Can proprietary software be justified?

What’s the justification for not allowing me to make a copy? Those who decry piracy call it theft, but it’s not theft since they aren’t losing anything. Not a physical product they could run out of, nor a potential sale as has been shown time and time again; people who pirate a thing generally wouldn’t have purchased the thing anyway.

Yes. Next stupid question.

I am not stealing. It’s there, I take it and it’s still there. Don’t know why these posts keep popping up in piracy communities. Same plague was there on reddit too. Like seriously it’s 2025.

Short answer: Yes.

I bought a quite expensive piece of animation software (that cost over $1000) to use professionally. The specific term it was sold to me under was a “perpetual license.” I took this to mean “never ending”, which is the dictionary definition of the word “perpetual.” You can probably guess where this is going.

A few years later, in the middle of a professional project, it stopped working. I contacted support, and was told that they changed the way they were doing licenses so I’d have to buy a new one (at almost double the price) or eat shit. I’m paraphrasing, but that was the gist of it.

So yeah, if you’re thinking of buying a Toon Boom Harmony perpetual license, maybe save yourself a lot of money and hassle and just pirate it instead. Or tell them to get fucked and use their direct competitor. I have done both.

Yes

Huh. Based on the community this was posted in, I can assume that the answer the video comes to is “yes” and not watch it. But according to Betteridge’s law of headlines the answer is “no.” I need to argue about this without watching it but I don’t know what stance to argue about.

Ah! I’ll use the Orbit plugin to get an AI to summarize the video for me. Hm. The AI-generated summary says the video describes an anecdote about music copyright violations, talks about some ethical considerations about both music and software piracy, and then:

The speaker concludes by acknowledging the complexity of the issue and the importance of considering the perspectives of all parties involved.

So I guess the answer was “Maybe?” How am I supposed to have a pointless Internet argument about “Maybe?”

Bah. Someone attack me for using AI, at least that’s a debate I can sink my teeth into.

Everyone has already given their response so there’s nothing really to add other than, well, there’s lots of reasons to justify piracy. Most of them are even provided by the publishers / distributors themselves!

Also it’s weird to browse the top 10 responses or even below, and NOT see this xkcd posted or even linked. What is going on, Lemmy?

I want the stuff, the stuff is there. I take it. The stuff is still there, nothing was lost, nothing was stolen.

1. It’s morally good when people access information, culture, and entertainment.
2. It’s morally good when the author of a work gets rewarded by their work.

Piracy is morally justified when 1 is a more pressing matter than 2. As such, it’s justified in situations like this:

• If, in the absence of piracy, the pirate would still not pay for the goods - because #2 is set up to zero (the author of the work is not rewarded anyway).
• If it’s impossible to obtain the goods without piracy. For example, abandonware.
• If the author of the work would get breadcrumbs of the money used to access legally the goods, and the pirate compensates the author directly (e.g. donation).

It’s always moral to steal from billionaires

Yeah.

For example, does Microsoft deserve my money for how much of a dumping they’ve taken onto Windows since Windows 8? No, they don’t.

Because if I did give Microsoft my money, I’m REWARDING them for their half-assery.

Yes. Next question.