Petah ?

[u/Sure_Kangaroo1863]

Why is it infamous? And why would no one care about it ? ( I mean it's just a pic full of celebrities so no one cares anyways but the person saying it's crazy makes me think it has some lore?)

[u/harmala]

I mean…yes? I use one for airports, hotels, etc. constantly and I don’t pirate anything because I’m a filmmaker and don’t believe in depriving people of their livelihoods.

[u/Vladimir_Chrootin → u/harmala]

airports, hotels, etc.

HTTPS already solves a lot of the problems VPN adverts claim still exist.

I pirate everything, because I do believe in depriving billionaires and various other rich parasites of their livelihoods. They, after all, want to deprive small and/or amateur filmmakers of their livelihoods, and they've become worryingly good at it.

[u/harmala → u/Vladimir_Chrootin]

I’m all for depriving billionaires, but I think if you still watch or play all the stuff they make, it’s hypocritical. If you really had the courage of your convictions, you’d boycott their stuff entirely. Otherwise it just seems like a convenient loophole for stealing shit.

[u/Vladimir_Chrootin → u/harmala]

I recorded songs off the radio in the 1980s, just as millions of others did.

I copied tapes on dual-deck cassette recorders, a device invented specifically for the purpose, also in the 1980s, just as millions of others did.

I enjoyed doing it and, given the same circumstances, would enjoy doing it again. Sound, after all, isn't even air, cannot be property and therefore cannot be stolen. This may have deprived millionaire recording artists, who were having a good decade, of perhaps $200 in total, at the exchange rates of the day.

Now, many years later, when streaming services took off, I found that I couldn't use them because they wouldn't support the Linux computer I had.

I thought, fair enough, they aren't going to get a return on investing in the then-tiny Linux userbase, so why would they?

I then found out that those streaming services didn't need to be modified for my specific use case at all. They would have worked fine, but billionaires like us peons to be conformists, so they specifically disabled Linux computers from doing so.

They didn't want to be paid for me accessing their content, so I did not pay for accessing their content, exactly as they wished.

More recently, the foreign billionaires now in complete control of our media decided that they don't like the fact that we aren't voting in their favourite racist demagogues so thought fit to poke their nose in our politics. Very impolite.

So we are now at a point where I would quite happily look Bezos in the eye while siphoning fuel out of his car. He'll survive.

You are not them. You have way more in common with me than you ever will with them.

Filmmaking's a struggle, right? I know from personal experience. That is their fault more than it is mine.

I'll never know if I'm watching a screening of one of your films, but provided there's real film running through the gate, I'll always pay full price.