So. It's time to try and structure my thoughts about piracy, its morality and its role in media preservation. In a nutshell, the Path of the Hook is one I recommend you follow, for your own good and, most importantly, for the health of human spirit altogether. Here's a couple things to keep in mind and a few limits you need to ponder. This is how I think of it, you might disagree with me at some point, but it will nonetheless serve as a good starting point for reflection.

First of all, I think there are differences between pirating different kinds of media. Starting with audiovisual media: it is almost always morally correct to pirate it, and in many cases it is critically necessary for you to do so if you want it to survive. Nowadays (and I'm not saying nothing revolutionary here), most of the films and shows are released exclusively (or primarily) on streaming platforms, and never get to exist in a physical format. That implies that a) you do not own what you're paying for, you're renting it, and b) the company can easily erase any work from existence at any time. The latter alone is enough to justify piracy, because if they remove something and no one pirated it, that piece of media is lost. Forever. The decision to nuke media is one taken by the company, not by the creators, and this has resulted in artists having to pirate their own work to save it from oblivion. From this perspective, therefore, I would urge you to assume that any audiovisual work that you haven't stored offline in a physical device is sentenced to death. If enough people assume the same and act accordingly to prevent it, then archival redundancy might be strong enough and that piece of art might survive extinction. But we need to do our share in order for it to work, it is a collective endeavour.

Perhaps you are thinking, "but what about all the people that work to create a piece of media, aren't you stealing their wages?" Well, the workers involved in producing a show or a film usually get paid a fixed amount for their work, regardless of how much the final product makes. They might get to keep a fraction of the revenue in the form of residuals, but between Hollywood's "creative accounting" and the impact of streaming on residual payments, many times they don't get to cash in anything, so I'd say the works' preservation highly outweights these hypotetical revenue losses.

"And what about the company who holds the rights, aren't you stealing their property?" Yes, I am. But a multi-million dollar company is not a human being. We shouldn't see them as subjects deserving of moral consideration. They are ungodly amalgamations of power and greed that are actively destroying society and the planet. Their losses don't harm anyone but those who profit off workers' precariousness, and I don't think we should consider those people as valid participants in society. Therefore, if I somehow harm Michael Mouse by downloading The Owl House, then so be it!

At the beginning I said that audiovisual media is almost always morally correct. That almost takes care of individual productions or small teams working to create their art. In this case, revenues are much more directly linked to actual people's wages and livelyhood. Here, putting "media preservation" over fairly compensating creators' time and effort is not something we should do, in my opinion. Piracy is a tool to be used against the capital, not against the workers. So, if your favorite artists sells cool videos, buy them whenever you can afford it, go watch indie film screenings, support small artistitic creation, because it is the only way art and culture can keep existing away from the claws of capitalism. However, if you are supporting artists via a subscription service and you are not getting the actual file of what you're paying for... I would still suggest finding a way to download it after you've paid for it. Remeber, anything that isn't stored on multiple places, will eventually disappear.

Moving away from films and shows, let's consider books. There is a critical difference between them and digital media, because books are still mainly a physical thing. Of course, e-books are more prevalent than ever, but they usually have a paper counterpart. And if they don't, you can easily create one. You can print a book, you cannot print an episode of Supernatural. And although adecquately backed up digital files are more resilient than a single physical copy of a book, they rely on our current digital infrastructure to survive. In two hundred years, when the Internet and computers are but distant memories, books will keep existing, if we manage to keep them away from the fire. With books, piracy is not the only tool for preservation.

This is why pirating books is mainly an economic issue, one that should follow the considerations I have outlined for digital media. Is the book from a giant publishing house or a millionaire writer who won't even notice it if you download their book? Pirate away! Are you interested in downloading an academic text behind a pay-wall? PLEASE, DO IT, SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING IS A SCAM THAT STEALS FROM BOTH THE AUTHORS AND THE READERS, PIRATE ALL YOUR PAPERS EVEN IF YOU CAN AFFORD TO PAY THEM. Is the book published by a small author to whom every sale matters? Maybe don't pirate it. Maybe buy the book when you can afford it, because again, supporting small creators is the only way to keep culture alive, to keep it bound to the people, to make artists, and therefore art, able to exist.

Lastly, an issue about which I don't have a clear answer. What if I cannot afford to buy a book or a film? Am I supposed to miss out on all the amazing independent art out there? Well, I think in these cases we should try other options first. Libraries are an amazing invention that offers a critically important service to society, and they need to be used in order to keep existing. So ask for it on your local library! You can also borrow it from a friend, or pool resources with a couple of friends and buy a copy together! Ideally, all culture should be free and available to everyone, but I think that shouldn't involve stealing other people's work (again, I'm talking about people, companies are not people). In practice, this would mean abolishing capitalism and the concept of money, but that's another story for another day...

Thanks for reading! What's your take on all this?? I would love to hear it!!