Ask Lemmy

I think it's ethically justifiable to pirate media that has been abandoned by its creators; without such action, media would become lost.

Legally, it's not ok until it goes out of copyright, but if the company that has the rights to a work isn't even selling it, it'd be rather weird for them to bother wasting money pursuing a claim against you.

I'd rather like to see the laws changed so that what feels ethical and what is legal are in alignment with each other again, but I don't expect sanity on that front to show up during my lifetime...

Are you asking if it's ethical, or asking if it's moral?

The main purpose of IP law is to reward creators and pirating old show where you can stimulate the creators revenue or influence stream then it's perfectly fine. In fact you might be doing good!

Given ai is pirating every god damn thing known to man, by their standards, completely legal, and if charged use that as a defense. Not a lawyer but been on both sides of the law to know how to use their mentality against them. For more grey areas of the law feel free to ask. Till then arrgh matey, happy sailing!!

My own personal morals are with where are the profits going? To the corporation ceos and stars? Then 100% stealing is justified. The writers, crew editors, session muscisians, programmera, designers etc got paid a salary once and yet others profit off it for decades, nah. I hold off on current shows if I want them to keep making more seasons.

I do try and be more thoughtful with bands and authors. I go to shows and signings and buy merch directly from them. Lord knows they don't earn anything off Spotify so may as well have my own library. I get most ebooks through Libby and dedrm them or at least borrow for a day before acquiring elsewhere since dedrm seems more difficult these days.

Retro games they already made their money, liberate them or at least make it easy and cheap to own. Steam solved this for modern PC games by having so far a decent service.

So in your case shows over, no one sells it, and if they did only a corporation would profit. Take the show Ed, there was never a DVD release and there's nowhere to stream it. So what other option is there if you want to rewatch it?

I would argue that nothing is universally justifiable, it all depends on the person committing to the action.

Piracy is justifiable for a lot of people, it's also not for a lot of people. It depends on what options those individuals have. You could also factor in societal norms or ethical impacts.

My view is the difference between an artist and a scam artist is that an artist would not mind others seeing their work without payment to make some assessment of its value and to build genuine support. I stopped going to movies because of my utter disappointment with the trash in the industry. A scam artist is going to demand payment before you even know what you're actually getting and use various shady marketing tactics, including sunk cost fallacy, to get your business.

If it is something I like and see value in what a person is doing, then I want to contribute to that. I don't want to pay a bunch of money to see something that I am left feeling like I just wasted money. Therefore, I have no problem with piracy to the extent that if I were to really enjoy it and want to keep watching then naturally I want to support the creators.

Yes.

Mostly because the media is no longer owned by the buyer. It used to be back in the day DVD box sets were a thing, now? Not so much. I think you should becuase it's been proven that a corporation will literally do whatever it needs for it to do to make shit more marketable. Including removing shows and what not if it has any issues to today's overtly contestable woke olympics.

Specifically to your situation I'd say it's an obligation to pirate it to archive history. Like sites that archive old video games that are otherwise abandonware and lost to history

Just commenting that Tubi afaik has a lot of old shows that Copyright holders put on there just to make a few bucks. It has ads and is owned by Fox.

What was the show?

It is never legally justifiable to pirate anything, by definition.

That being said, ahoy maties, 🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️

you forgot the not.

Nothing is justifiable, even breathing (you're taking oxygen away from those who need it more).

If you need to pirate, do so. Stop asking for philosophical justification. You sound like a mole from the DMCA.

I have never heard a convincing argument that any piracy is ethically or morally wrong: no one is being deprived of anything. You have to manually construct a scenario where someone is about to pay an independent artist for their work and then decides to use a copy instead, and even then I think it's hard to argue any actual harms.

It's still morally wrong in the absolute sense since you're taking something for free that you're implicitly expected to pay for. However if there is no way for you to actually pay for it even if you wanted then that makes this one of the clearer cases in which one can morally defend piracy. It's still not right but it's less wrong.

The only scenario that I can think of that would be even more clear is when you've actually bought the media already but the disc got damaged for example as was the case with my GTA San Andreas back in the day: I had bought the game but the disc exploded in the drive so I was forced to crack it so that I could play without the disc.

TLDR- In your case, that wouldn't be called piracy.