The sentiment around buying European/Canadian alternatives to American products and services is a great one, and I can get behind the movement, but there is more to it.
Not all products and services have alternatives that are viable. You can’t get your workplaces to move to libreoffice or get your mom to start using signal messege. Moreover, even when using Europa products and services you still perpetuate the culture of uncontrolled capitalism and enriching tech billionaires. Open Source Alternatives, Piracy, and Ad Blocking are all equally viable.
Keeping this in mind, remember that piracy and ad blocking are great ways to keep using American services without contributing to their bottom line.
There are ad free versions of YouTube, reddit, Instagram and Facebook apps. They’re all patched with revanced and are available on github.
Additionally, pirate media as much as you can and be unapologetic about it. Facebook is doing it, so can you. Pirate music, movies, books they’re all available. Torrents community has never been safer and better organised.
Consume without paying and that does more damage to their bottomlines.
Then, if the issue is the existence of that ‘culture’ one should not use these apps at all, not even pirated. Because piracy of those apps still amounts to using them which make the ‘culture’ stronger.
Can you remind me how badly piracy of MS Office and Windows Microsoft hurt their stock value? And how badly piracy of Photoshop hurt Adobe stocks? Yeah, not at all.
Not all artists are sponsored by some billionaire, many do need to earn a living. Lucky for you if you have enough wealth to not need to get paid for your work.
That being said, everyone is more than welcome to do whatever they want. I just prefer when one doesn’t try to make it look for what it is not. Piracy is not helping anyone but the pirate not wanting to pay and it’s not hurting corporations—it could easily kill an indie dev, though. Edit: as well as small indie artists.
Not everyone has the option to turn off from certain technologies. My employment requires me to use social media websites (but I can choose to block ads on them)
Piracy of MS office doesn’t impact Microsoft much because Microsoft is primarily a cloud and enterprise IT company. For Netflix, Spotify and Disney, piracy would have a meaningful impact. That’s why Netflix cracked down on password sharing.
Piracy isn’t mutually exclusive with supporting your favourite artists. You can still go to concerts, buy merch, donate or buy physical media. I pirated three of Supergiant’s first three video games, and then when I was earning, I bought the games again and played them because of how good they are. Now I buy their games on early access every time.
Never discussed that. Only reacted to the ‘cultural’ issue mentioned and the idea that piracy was some kind of resistance to capitalism because in my opinion it is not. At best, it is a way for people without money to access some product or service (which I have nothing against) but it certainly does not fight capitalism, quite the contrary it still fuels it.
If it’s pro usage, and if the tool is costing money, my opinion is that it should be paid for, end of the discussion. Simply put, I know no business that does not get paid for doing their business (don’t tell me you’re working for free, or that your company does not send invoices to customers and does not expect to get paid?). So, since doing business is all about getting paid, it’s only fair to also pay for other’s business one’s own business relies on. Be it a license of Word or Photoshop, or pack of ink cartridges and a stack of paper.
In what year were released Photoshop, MS Office and Windows? And in what year did MS entered the cloud business (and then in what year did it become the dominant part of their balance sheet? And for Adobe?). Piracy was heavily going on years prior to their adoption of cloud, it still never hurt them, quite the contrary it helped them grow more.
Like I already said, I’m not against piracy (people are free). I just don’t like when I see things getting all mixed up and leading to even more confusion.
Piracy is not resistance. Piracy is not paying for something that is supposed to be paid for. Resisting that model of society (capitalistic, consumerist) is a whole other thing.
Like paying taxes is not exclusive to donating to charities. Still, how many among us do pay their taxes and then donate to charities? How many donate to their favorite artists?
Like reading free news online is not exclusive with paying for paid newspapers/magazines/paywalled websites. How much of us still pay for those?
Like using Free/Libre Software is not exclusive of donating to support them but how many of us do that? I would be curious to listen to devs on that matter.
This is a long discussion now, and answering everything point by point will be a lengthy exercise.
I’ll say this: I believe in a world run by corporate interests, piracy is similar to civil disobedience. If we collectively decide to create friction to the functioning of the system, it can in combination with other ways of resistance influence the situation in our favour.
I agree with that wholeheartedly. I’m just saying piracy is not such a friction, quite the opposite. And if we try to influence the situation, something we both care about, recognizing that is not of little importance. Obviously, I may be mistaken but money talk loudly how ineffective piracy seem to be.