this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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What you get from pirating is not having to pay. Purchasing a movie still gives you the same entertainment and cultural capital.
Nobody is obligated to hand out for free something they put time, effort, and capital into creating and running. If someone can justify to themselves that it's okay to download it for free, then criticizing AI companies for doing the exact same thing is hypocritical on their part.
Making money and saving money achieve exactly the same thing: you end up with more to spend.
Yeah because saving money as an individual is the same as a company choosing to not pay copyright holders so they can make more profit from pirating petabytes of info
Very clever, you are clearly very intelligent
Let me put an /s just so this doesn't go over your head too
Company is run by individuals.
I have no idea why you need to start insulting me now.
Despite being run by individuals I think there's at least some amount of difference between pirating a book to read it and pirating all books in existance to make copius amount of profits.
Not arguing for any moral superiority here, just pointing the difference.
But in both cases you have the option to pay - yet choose not to. If money wasn't an issue, there wouldn't really be any reason to pirate anything. That's why I see piracy as a financial decision, and thus I don't think piracy advocates have any ground to stand on when they criticize AI companies for doing the exact same thing. It's not identical, but it's equivalent.
One could even argue that individual piracy is selfish because it only benefits the one person doing it. AI companies at least are providing a product that hundreds of millions of people get value out of - and the vast majority of them get it for free.