It is illegal and immoral. It steals the rightful intellectual property of directors and developers who are only trying to make a living. If you want to be a thief so badly, then rob a federal bank.
First, piracy is not illegal everywhere, and a personal copy is the most legal way in almost every country to archive what you have bought.
As for the morality of it, it’s your problem, not mine.
And the most important question is: What can I do when whole countries do not sell their music or TV shows? I’m thinking of Poland or Japan for example. I cannot legally buy media from those countries because they don’t care about foreign customers. How can they lose money if they don’t sell anything?
If you want a concrete example that happened to me yesterday: I want to buy a subscription to https://pilot.wp.pl/tv/. I want to give my money yet they refuse it. What can I do?
I’m a big fan of paying the people who make things for me.
But digital piracy is the only thing keeping archive copies of obscure media around today. Even libraries aren’t keeping up. Plenty of media creators have revived their thing that found an audience after decades forgotten - through piracy, and only successfully revived it thanks to archivist pirates, since they had thrown that thing away.
It’s not black and white.
Patronage funding, early access, streamlined delivery, and white glove support are the funding models that are working for creatives today.
Shop local, steal from corporate.
No you shouldn’t steal from small or independent creators. However don’t try to tell me that Disney is going to go out of business because I pirated their latest movie.
