[shrimp_emoji]

Pirating is seizing a ship for material goods. People get hurt or killed when this happens. And the economics of material goods are literally otherworldly from those of digital goods. (You can't download a car -- copying a car for practically free.)

Torrenting is just choosing the most convenient distribution mechanism for data that you own. You can buy DRM-free music, but not DRM-free shows or movies unless they're bound to physical media. The reasons why have to do with backdoor meetings and lobbying by the MPAA, and I don't care much about them. And Netflix expects me to own nothing and be happy while leasing tenuous network access to compressed streams of content by paying indefinitely. Cute.

I think it's funny they got us to implicitly condemn solving their greed-based distribution problem with a term as hyperbolic as "pirating" though. They want to remain in meatspace, where the old economic model makes sense -- scarcity, wear and tear, manufacturing costs per unit, so they try pretending we're all still there in cyberspace by guilt tripping us with meatspace vocabulary.

[joemi]

There's a lot to unpack in what you wrote, and I agree with a lot of it. But you seem to be implying that the fact that you can't buy DRM-free shows or movies via your preferred distribution method (ie. without physical media) morally justifies illegally downloading stuff you haven't paid for (Netflix shows -- which as you noted you're not paying-to-own if you have a subscription). I can't agree with that, and I can't see how that makes any sense. Why do you think you have a right to obtain Netflix's content any way you please?

Also: "Piracy" might be a bad term for the act of uploading and downloading something for which you do not have the rights to do so since it is indeed different than physical piracy, but "torrenting" is not an improvement, since torrenting _can_ be completely legal, depending on what content is being uploaded and downloaded. I think it's useful to have a term that specifically refers to the illegal act. I haven't heard of a good popular term for this yet, so I'm OK with using "piracy".

[shapefrog]

If I could download a car, I would.