Most people have extremely weird ideas of what's considered piracy and what isn't. Downloading a video game rom is piracy, but if you pay money to some Chinese retailer for an SD card containing the roms, that's somehow not piracy. Exploiting the free trial on a streaming site by using prepaid visa cards is somehow not piracy either. Torrenting an album is piracy, but listening to a bootleg on YouTube isn't.

YouTube noticed this at some point and is now happy to let everyone know how much pirated music is available on their site. One of their main points for shilling YouTube premium is how their music catalogue is way better than Spotify. Of course the piracy site has more. That's always how it works. Spotify actually has to license the music on their platform and is subject to copyright law. They can't just get the Neil Young discography from soulseek one day and wait until his estate notices, facing no repercussions whatsoever aside from agreeing to a takedown request. Imagine if Pirate Bay or Napster were considered completely above-board businesses just because they took down torrents if explicitly requested by the copyright holders.

Not that I'm complaining especially when a lot of the music on youtube isn't publicly accessible anywhere else. It's just been extremely strange to see this go from an "open secret" to something they're shouting from the rooftops and face no repercussions for. In the future I want everything to be like that and I'd rather keep youtube how it is than see them get the punishment that by all rights they should be getting. It's just so strange that this is the position things have ended up in.

Note: The following text is intentional abuse of the tagginator bot. Fuck you.

#ADHD #BOSTON #NYC #OpenSource #FOSS #SelfHosted #Soccer #3dprinting #Memes #GodotEngine #Unity #UnrealEngine

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[–] Buffalobuffalo@reddthat.com 122 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Buying an SD card full of Roms is piracy, that’s why you have to buy it from Chinese companies and not walk down to the Walmart.

YouTube has agreements with the record companies to pay them for money generated through music uploaded to YouTube. For music where they don’t have an agreement the DMCA means that the uploaded need to verify they have the copyright to thing they upload. Otherwise no social media or file hosting sites could exist.

[+] clearleaf@lemmy.world -40 points 1 year ago (2 children)

With the SD what you're talking about is reality but I meant it in terms of normies perceptions. I watched some retro handheld reviews on YouTube and it started surfacing videos about SD cards of retro roms you can buy. There's always people pointing out that you can just download the same rompack from archive.org, and there are people replying who say that's piracy. I couldn't make something like that up if I tried. Here's another one specifically about YouTube. If you torrent a song, that's bad. But if you use a YouTube to mp3 website that's different. My family sees it that way.

[–] Aatube@kbin.social 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Your family may be hydrophobiacs.

(because a torrent is a water stream! get it? hehehehehehehh)

[–] SoylentBlake@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Is pirating old snes and genesis roms really piracy if there's no other way to get it?

Roms are the reason half those games are still around and not dead media. The popularity of roms is why Nintendo made the throw back, video game companies roll up all the time, very few have longevity and even if those most would've been fine just letting the old games die in obscurity.

[–] Railcar8095@lemm.ee 16 points 1 year ago

Legally speaking it's piracy and copyright infringement.

Unofficially, it's a moral obligation to download and seed.

[–] clearleaf@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

In the eyes of the law it's piracy. But to me if something is not being sold, it might as well be public domain. And there's literally no difference between buying a second hand mario 3 cartridge and pirating the rom in terms of money the creators get. That's way more ridiculous to me than the youtube thing.

[–] SoylentBlake@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

Oh doncha know manufacturers are already working on that.

The whole subscription economy grift. They're gonna say you own the basic version arguing against the 'if you can't modify it you never really own it' crowd, until they've spent enough money to bribe those in power to fashion their win for them, then they're gonna turn around and say we never really own anything and make reselling illegal.

Reselling takes care of itself if you simply stop offering physical media...which, idk...seems to be the trend of the last 15 years, don't cha think?