This is exceedingly rare, but I would buy it and then share it with the world for free.

did it one textbooks one time, when i couldnt find it to pirate like 10 years ago. they were going hard against any newer versions before, and against the torrents/downloaders who were hosting the pirates.

I never pay Capitalist corps/people unless pressured to a corner (most groceries, loans etc). I know they cheat, steal and lie - pretty much 24/7 - as their ‘free market’ gospel dictates, so any support for such a selfish/psychopathic organization are like shooting my self in the foot.

Intellectual ‘property’ is a special anti-intellectual joke that have emerged inside an existing Capitalist dystopia where everyone have to fight everyone else for their lives. So suddenly, some Capitalist smuck could whistle a tune, declare that sequence of sounds as “MY PROPERTY” and then - through violence! - everyone around the world have to pay this moron for the sequence of sounds. It doesn’t get much more dumb than that. We even see cities ‘protect’ their landmarks, so a f’ing photo is illegal without paying up, copyright for well known everyday things, and so on. It is incredibly easy to find insane examples. It’s all a race to the bottom, sigh… Oc, Capitalism have zero to do with ‘free markets’, and everything to do with warring/exploitation/protectionism - but all corps will always exploit.

Unfortunately, Capitalism runs on pure scarcity, so we can’t have surplus objects that can just be copied, tsk tsk, what disorder !! And of cause, if one lives in such a crappy backwards society, then everyone HAVE to fight for data that can be copyrighted, data that could otherwise be copied a gazillion times for everyones joy. So, Instead of free access to all that can be freely copied/enjoyed, we have capitalist silo’s of ‘property’, where everyone are forced to pay up to a conglomerate of capitalist cancer-like entities that will go to any length - even jailing people that refuse that violent/ridiculous property nonsense. No no, for propertarians, it’s better to slam everyone in the world with laws/threats of harm, to invade peoples privacy, and to have a whole multi-trillion business market, and an insane amount of law resources constantly working to keep this joke of a principle running. It all arose from out of that flawed premise of everyone fighting everyone else… Inefficient, stupid, and all just an unnecessary emergent artifact on top of the dumbest ideology the oligarchs ever invented.

I am far too poor to afford to buy shit. If I can’t pirate shit, I just do without.

Usually the second, which is the most common option, because we know objectively that studios are in fact not “losing” eleventy billion dollars to piracy. If that were true most people would choose the first.

I’m not buying the new Pokémon game. I’ll play it on an emulator if it’s not too much hassle. I don’t have plans to ever buy it, and if it never works on emulation, I will just not play it.

In a different case, I’ve gone from pirating a bunch of games to buying them because I liked them and wanted the updates. BG3 for example.

I’m not employed and have little to no money, so…

Piracy is my main resort been doing it so long. After HD-DVD lost I was done buying media. Don’t get me wrong I still pirated before that but it was more renting and ripping DVDs.

Piracy is typically my last resort. It means it’s already unavailable under acceptable conditions.

so, usually if i can’t find it through direct download or torrent, i might try asking around, or looking in open directories even, and if all of that fails i lay awake at night Really bothered

Depends. Sometimes I’ll give it up all together. If I think it’s worth it I’ll buy it. Other times I thought it wouldn’t be worth it and I pirate it and then I end up buying it afterwards. Other times I just wait for a steep discount/sale.

Most of the stuff I want to pirate, is because they are expensively rare or not available through stores. Mind, that might change in the future, just because of how crap the US economy is becoming for the ordinary person.

I want to support cool stuff by paying, if the terms are reasonable. That means no DRM, all content, and an appropriate price. It is mostly hentai games that I am buying, since the developers of those definitely need the money.

There’s a child of books that I’ve bought in this way.

Also I bought some books that I’ve pirated, to support the author.

I’m rich, so I buy it, rip it and upload it to pirate bay.

Depends on how much I want it.

For music, I buy the CDs (if I can) to support the artist.
But I also recently ripped my whole spotify playlist.

For other types of media, if it’s not in the quality I want, and it’s reasonable in price, I’ll pay it.
Then I’ll rip it and put it in my library.

It’s usually the opposite that’s the issue for me. If it’s not free, OK, let’s pay, but if it’s not a reasonable price for the product (including both the content, usability, and reusability, in case of media), then I’ll go out of my way to get it free or totally give up on it depending on how much I want it. That’s why I switched from piracy to Netflix for many years and now am back to piracy because I like shows in the background while working on projects, for example, or piracy, then Steam, then, fuck gaming as much because I found other hobbies.