It’s a good way to get your data stolen/malware. Don’t get me wrong from 10-18 I used pirated software exclusively. But it’s not secure or a good idea at all if you’re going to use, say, banking or crypto stuff. You can get a winblows key from a reseller for like $15-20USD. I personally wouldn’t mess around with any of it anymore. I got a bunch of cool art programs in a bundle for I think $25 ($400 usd value) that I use now, and before that I used Krita.
this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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Not entirely sure what you're asking. Pirated software is just software you've copied without permission. It can be anything.
It's not so easy to answer if piracy is ethical, depends of the context. It's not the same soft from a shady company and from a small dev team or startup. Anyway, due to the overhelming amount of free alternatives, piracy in most of the cases isn't necessary. I'm using an PC since almost 30 years now and never had the need to piracy an soft or pay for it. There are tons of free and OpenSource soft and services out ther, often better as the commercial ones, giveaway campaigns in games (Steam, Itch.io, DigiPen and others are full of good free games) and soft, free music (Bandcamp, Pixelfed, FMA,,,,,), etc. only needs to search a little.
Make your own Netflix 7GB (size of one hour 4k HDR content) * 3 (hours) * 30.5 (Average days in a month) = 640.5 GB
A good, new, brand name 20TB drive costs ~$300, that's $15 per TB.
Thats $9 a month. When your drives are full just buy another drive.
Add $20 for a usenet sub, VPN, another maybe $5 at most for other hardware.
I would still encode and compress the files without noticeable visual loss from a reasonable distance.
AV1-opus combo is generally a good choice and is a viable open codec alternative to x265! Plus you save GB of space for even nore movies and share your encodes on a private tracker to keep up your ratio !!
It's a win/win situation except if you're a hardcore bluray/4k hoarder and have the money and mean to keep everything in the native quality. More power to you !!
Personally, I think piracy is a tool of the desperate, the disheartened and those that don't care for awarding merit. The desperate if a software is too hard to come by legitimately, the disheartened as a form of protest if the software/company has draconian practices at play, and those that don't award merit because they would, if not never, at least rarely buy/rent anything if not forced to.
FOSS is nice and all, but do mind people are expending their time in such projects, so if you think a project is good and you can afford it, I'd suggest supporting financially the creators.