(Illegally) downloading "free" music, movies etc - have you/do you

[aceplace57]

I have a lot of tv shows downloaded. TV is a free media paid for by commercials. I have no problems dl something broadcast into my home. If I'm not home to see a show, then I dl and watch later. Just like I used my VCR 15 years ago.

The majority of my music is stuff I ripped from my cd collection. I paid money for those cd's.

Guess everyone knows Demonoid got taken down?

[oreally]

Originally Posted by aceplace57

I have a lot of tv shows downloaded. TV is a free media paid for by commercials.

Cable is free in Arkansas?

[TBG]

Originally Posted by Vicullum

I've been downloading ever since pre-Internet days (remember BBS?) and currently have around 2TB of content sitting on my drives. Only around 1GB of that is music--the rest are movies and complete television seasons.

If you're wondering if I feel sorry, the answer is HELL NO. The movie and recording industries are among the sleaziest, money-grubbing rackets ever and they routinely try to screw over creators and customers alike. Just look at how they use shady accounting practices to cornhole people out of their cut, like the creators of Forrest Gump and Babylon 5. And when the record industry is not suing grandmothers and 13-year-olds for hundreds of thousands of dollars, they also cheat their artists--just look at this article on techdirt about their own brand of unethical accounting.

Also copyright laws are entirely out of whack. Things shouldn't take nearly a century to fall into the public domain. It's hard to feel guilt about downloading something that shouldn't still be under copyright but because Disney keeps paying off Congress still will be until long after I'm dead.

[aceplace57]

You don't need cable to watch tv. We have this thing called an antenna. Upgraded a couple years ago for digital tv.

Originally Posted by oreally

Cable is free in Arkansas?

[gladtobeblazed]

Yeah I've downloaded tons of stuff in my day. Usenet, IRC, FTP servers, P2P networks, bittorent, file hosts...

I don't feel bad about it. I'll start respecting copyright the day it becomes effectively enforceable.

That being said, I don't download too much anymore. There's just way too many free sources of entertainment to be had with Youtube, Pandora, Last.fm, etc. I've been finding a lot of original content on Youtube to be more entertaining than most movies and tv shows.

[oreally]

Originally Posted by aceplace57

You don't need cable to watch tv. We have this thing called an antenna. Upgraded a couple years ago for digital tv.

Which won't get you these things called cable channels. You do need cable to watch those. Almost everything on the major networks is utter garbage IMO.

Either way, it isn't "free."

[Vicullum]

Originally Posted by TBG

Also copyright laws are entirely out of whack. Things shouldn't take nearly a century to fall into the public domain. It's hard to feel guilt about downloading something that shouldn't still be under copyright but because Disney keeps paying off Congress still will be until long after I'm dead.

I actually started a thread asking why copyright lasts so ridiculously long. Apparently, like most of modern history, the blame lies with the Germans.

[Rucksinator]

I once bought a music CD at Wal-Mart. When I got home I realized it was a censored version. So I downloaded the uncensored versions of the songs that I liked.

Originally Posted by C K Dexter Haven

My one exception: I do have a DVD of the Disney SONG OF THE SOUTH that was bought in Korea, and subtitled in Korean. I don't know if it's a pirate or not, but since it's available outside the US but not in the US, screw Disney.

My parents bought a copy of SotS somewhere down south. I think it was some kind of roadside shop. They probably stopped to buy peaches or pecans or boiled peanuts or something.

[yellowval]

I'll admit it, I do it. Mostly with books. I read 'em and delete 'em, and tell myself it isn't that much worse than checking the book out from the library. If it's something I want to keep, I buy it.

[bouv]

In college I was a MASSIVE download whore. That was the early 2000's, which as said, were the glory days of Napster, iMesh, Scour, KaZaa, Grokster, Limewire, Morpheus...and several others. In addition, I went to school at a very tech-savvy school, and someone had written a cool script that searched and indexed files from all the shared computers on the network (well, all the ones on the regular network student's connected to and weren't PW protected.) Since downloading from the internal network was a LOT faster than externally, it allowed for a lot more downloads.

Entire seasons of TV shows I didn't even care to watch, albums from people I didn't know of, etc...and a lot of games. Since there was such a large network, it was easy to play online games over it, even if the pirated copy was banned from FULL online play.

But, I've reformed. It's been almost ten years since then, and I'm older, wiser, and more importantly I have money to buy things now.

However, there is still one thing I illegally download, and that's the occasional single episode of a TV show. If I miss it when it airs, and I forgot to DVR it, I see no difference in my downloading. If I did use a DVR, I wouldn't watch ads, much like the downloaded episode. I'm paying for satellite service, and I don't download shows from networks I don't pay for, so from a moral perspective, I see no harm.

[Declan]

I did not download it, but I came to be in possession of a hard drive with the entire season two of game of thrones, so that makes me just as guilty I suppose. But like last year, I will pick up the DVD of season two, so that it balances out.

Declan

[Imasquare]

Originally Posted by Martian Bigfoot

I used to pirate music and video games, but then iTunes and Steam came along. Turns out that I didn't really want avoid paying for things, I was just to goddamn lazy to go actually go to a store. Why I still can't easily do the same thing with movies is beyond me.

You can rent movies and TV shows from iTunes.

[williambaskerville]

Originally Posted by Little Nemo

Yes, I'm talking about the 1986 movie with Amanda Plummer and Oliver Reed. Technically, the Tom Hanks movie was Cast Away

Wasn't it Amanda Donohue ?

[Little Nemo]

Originally Posted by Little Nemo

Yes, I'm talking about the 1986 movie with Amanda Plummer and Oliver Reed. Technically, the Tom Hanks movie was Cast Away

Originally Posted by williambaskerville

Wasn't it Amanda Donohue ?

You're a better man than me. I wouldn't have been able to resist the urge to post "Technically, the star of Castaway was Amanda Donohue."

[Ximenean]

Well, strictly speaking it was Amanda Donohoe.

[Apocalypso]

Back in the Napster days I used to download music to sample it and see if I liked it. If I did, I would buy the cd(s). I found so much good music that way. I don't like the radio much (too much chattering and commercials), and listen to a lot of smaller bands that wouldn't get played on the radio anyway. So it was great.
Then when Napster folded, I went to a couple other services for a while, then they all started shutting down so I gave it up.

I have a ton of mp3's now, but they're all from my own cd collection. I do sometimes long for the glory days of music sharing, it was a great way to sample and check stuff out. I do understand that a lot of people use it to get free music and not pay for it though.

[Gatopescado]

Originally Posted by oreally

Remember this is anonymous, fess up

How do you figure?

[Cartooniverse]

I don't truck with piracy.

[mhendo]

Originally Posted by GargoyleWB

Wondering if you've had to run the circus of university textbooks. I call this more 'civil disobediance' rather than stealing.

Case in point...a $195 grad school textbook that the professor mandated yet was only used for one supplementary chapter (20 pages) out of 400 pages and the publisher has no available early editions or student versions? And the university library only had one copy of? You can bet that the whole lecture hall either had a download or photocopy of it.

This is an incredibly poor example.

You and others have suggested that the textbook industry is somehow a racket, but i don't understand how the industry is to blame for your particular problem.

The textbook publisher produced a 400-page textbook. It's not their fault if your professor only wants to use one 20-page chapter in his course; it's not their fault that your library only has one copy; and it's not their fault that your professor and/or your library were too lazy to digitize a copy of that chapter and make it available for download, which would have been perfectly acceptable under Fair Use in your situation.