Comment by Forgeties79
3 hours ago
When did that exist? The Napster era when when people just got free music from a central server and accidentally put viruses on their computer half the time? The 18th century on the seas when it was a lot more murder, actual theft, and worse?
Piracy has never been about the culture or game preservation or whatever. It’s about getting free stuff for 99% of pirates. There are people across the spectrum with additional motivations, for instance maybe somebody was annoyed by the state of streaming and it drove them to piracy. But at the end of the day, the vast majority people are downloading the stuff they want because it’s 1) free and 2) available to them.
I fully support piracy but I also don’t pretend it’s some high-minded philosophical reason. There are moments where that element comes into play for me, especially when it comes to losing media, but I’m not going to sit here and pretend that is the number one reason anyone opens up Pirate Bay or whatever came before.
you're confusing pirate consumers and pirate providers
You’re absolutely right. I was way too eager to jump on that
Also not sure if you’ve ever been part of a private tracker but there a much higher percentage of users have additional motivation to contribute. Some of that is because contributing provides additional benefits to consumption. But also it’s for the love of the game. The losses of oink and what.cd were a bit like the burning of the library of Alexandria. Those libraries were the cumulative effort of tens of thousands of people sharing and meticulously cataloging. Much closer to maintaining a library or an archive than something like TPB. There is no doubt there is music that is now lost to time which was once dutifully uploaded and then preserved by a seeder on those sites. I personally have uploaded content that is not available to purchase anywhere to their successor.