Pirating, it bears a lot of weight, and can seem like a hefty and aggressive word. It sounds bad, but I don’t believe it is, to an extent. Pirating is what it is: stealing. And I know several people who are guilty of it. It can be anything, from getting music off the internet to genuinely stealing games on the internet. A lot of people think that pirating is bad, for it is stealing and is a criminal offense, but realistically, it isn’t that bad.

Things can get lost online, and some people dedicate a lot of time to preserving those things that are lost in the vastness of the internet. People who run things like the hShop, which are dedicated to keeping all of the old Nintendo games above the surface of the web, and not having them lost to time.

Some people dedicate their entire online presence to leaking information about news for content, whether being video games or movies. People love it when things get leaked, especially when they are something that is super popular and has a bunch of traction behind it. For example, in GTA 6, the leak was taken well, but the developers were not too happy about it.

A lot of people online usually would consider pirating from developers that they see as greedy okay, not something that would be frowned upon. Developers such as Activision or Nintendo are where most of the game piracy comes from. They charge astronomical prices for their work, and most of the time, it is low quality. For older content that was put out during a “prime” for a company is usually what gets pirated or preserved, for it is their best work.

Now, most people think pirating is okay to an extent, but when it comes to stealing from small devs and curators, usually frowned upon. They put in a lot of time into things and their projects, and usually are not charging an astronomical price for their content, so to pirate from them is unethical and rude. There was an event within a community when a game called Silksong came out, and people tried to pirate it. It got to a point where the people who pirate the most decided to say something about it, stating that it was not okay to pirate the game.

Generally, pirating can be frowned upon, but when it comes to the risk of lost media from whatever circumstances, that’s where people will usually argue for it. For the sake of preserving what they have a connection to. When it comes to the smaller developers or the content of smaller creators, it’s extremely frowned upon and not accepted amongst the community