#piracy is a victimless crime

[diamond-rings-and-gutter-bones]

listen up y'all

what are you gonna do now that soap2day is gone? you are gonna find yourself another free site to watch things on, thats what. *how* are yall gonna do that? im gonna tell you, **as long as you have an adblocker** (if you use firefox there are a bunch of good ones ive used but currently i recommend adblocker ultimate)

1. google "watch [movie/show] for free online". a list of sites will come up. some are illegal streaming sites. some are not. you figure out which is which mostly by clicking on them

2. if nothing useful comes up, scroll to the bottom of the page. check page 2 of google search results

3. if *that* doesnt work, scroll back to the bottom of page 1. therell probably be some bs disclaimer about them removing search results because of copyright claims, and itll provide a list of the complaints. click on one of these complaints

4. after being taken to the complaint page, scroll down to where it says "allegedly infringing urls" and copy+paste those urls, one by one, to see if any work. in all likelihood one or two will but most wont. rinse and repeat with each "complaint" link until you find one that works and doesnt seem likely to take control of your computer or something

5. when youve found a site, dont go blasting its name all over the internet, for the same reason im not just *telling* you the sites *i* use. yeah, share it with your friends and family, but you dont want to draw more attention to it. this might just be me being a bit paranoid but whatever

[true-autistic-tales]

inspired by @/everyponie's art :3

[scarletbees]

hi nonexistent tumbr audience, im learning german. if u know german u should send a girly some movie/book recs :3333

[rosedubh]

my brother: yeah some kids at [Boy Scout] camp were watching inside out 2 on their phones, i don’t know how though. Maybe they had some kind of movie theater app?

bless his heart

[valkyrie-night-103]

I'll ask about the time travel fuckery because honestly time travel is the only way out of my my current mental state. (Pain)

Also Piracy is a Victimless Crime as well! Because it is lol.

I’ve got much more content for the second, so I’ll discuss that here! I’ve yet to flesh this out fully, but I have the premise here!

Piracy is a Victimless Crime (Pirate AU)

Yuta runs away from home with a dream to sail the world. He joins a ragtag crew called the Best Friends, consisting of two paternal co-captains, a grouchy first-mate/quartermaster, and the ship’s navigator, a girl not much older than him who seems to serve as an enforcer on behalf of the quartermaster.

Though the captains seem to accept him with open arms, the navigator and quartermaster are far less fond of him (Kris and Trent respectively if that’s not already clear-). It feels like he’s left a life that felt like a prison, just to crawl into an isolated cage.

It takes the best friends approximately two months on the open sea to get into trouble. Their boat is captured by a pirate crew, lead by an infamous privateer-turned-pirate from the British isles, known for being ruthless. They put up a good fight, but fleeing becomes the only option.

Food is running low, but they can’t moor the boat in the harbour. This whole coast is controlled by the BCC. Yuta volunteers himself to take a rowboat to shore and trade for enough food to get them to safety.

He encounters the ex-privateer captain, His Lordship William Regal, in the coastal markets. His crew are with him, and Yuta is captured rather easily despite his efforts. He thinks it’s all over, at best he’ll be marooned. He’s heard rumours, though, that the barrels of salt aren’t for preserving fish.

Instead, he’s given a room below deck, and is informed he is being held for ransom. He is free to roam the ship, but must contribute to the duties of the crew. It’s made clear that any attempt at escape will lead to severe consequences.

Chuck and Orange notice Yuta hasn’t returned, and search for him. Upon searching the markets, they discover the news of the ransom, and are given a handwritten letter from Regal detailing their requests. They don’t have nearly enough, but the Co-Captain’s of the Best Friends crew are dead-set on getting their son back.

The thing is, the longer Yuta is with the BCC, the less he wants to leave.

[boop-le-snoot]

Illegal does not automatically mean unethical, or immoral.

DIGITAL PIRACY 101

Pinning this since I genuinely think Piracy is a great skill to have and I want to share it with anyone who'd like to see it

Okay so! You need to download something!

Be it a movie, a game, a software, a book. Where do you even start? You know people catch viruses or fines pirating, so how to do it, and do it safely? This is going to be a bit verbose, so coloured text has the most important info. THIS WILL BE LONG but you can just skim it! (P.S. there are some goodies for artists in the end so do take a peek there if you do art and would like courses or procreate brushes) By the end of this you should be able to download or stream almost anything.

(Disclaimer: I'm not super knowledgeable on the technical side of things, just a moderately seasoned pirate. Will explain stuff to the best of my abilities, but there will be wild semplifications. If there's any issue, or precisations you'd like to make, or just need a hand with something, feel free to reach out to me directly on here!)

Putting a cut here so I don't spam your dashes <3 - now, here we go:

First off: ADBLOCKERS. It's dangerous to go alone. Take this: a little browser add-on that will prevent you from seeing ads and popups ever again. Yeah, no more ads on Youtube either btw. Most malware you risk getting while pirating is the result of ads and pop-ups! Important: Chromium based browsers will start dropping support for adblockers starting 2023. These include: Chrome, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave. (Brave has its built-in adblocker, but it's very controversial, has a huge focus on crypto, and tries to push its own crypto trading ads on you, among other things.) This is simply happening because Google (who mantains Chromium) is in big parts an Ad Company, aka makes money from selling ads to you. Mozilla Firefox is not affiliated or mantained in any way by Google, and will support Adblocking indefinitely. Just so you know. The BEST Ad Blocker around is uBlock Origin, by Raymond Hill (gorhill). It's recommended that you use it at all times, as it will not slow down your browser but will improve your user experience drastically! Official add-on installs: Firefox, Chrome (until 2023)

How does it work? There are two kinds of downloads: Direct Downloads and Torrents. Direct Download Link (DDL): you click on the thing, the browser downloads it. Simple! It's an 1 on 1 communication between you and their servers. Pros: no hassle, super easy, nothing else to do, pretty safe. Cons: downloading big files is sloooow, and if your connection falters just a few seconds, you gotta start from the top again. Torrenting: the good stuff. It's "Peer to Peer", or P2P. The way I understand it: you're put in a room (a "swarm") with a bunch of people. Some want the file (Peers and Leechers), some already have it and are giving it around (Seeders). You all share small pieces of the file around, and eventually everyone will get a complete file. Seeders are the most important part: a torrent with zero seeders will not start (no one is giving out the file). A torrent with 200 seeders will be immensely faster than one with 3 seeders. It's good etiquette to seed back what you download, in a 1:1.10 ratio: you upload what you downloaded (1:1) and then a little more. Sharing is caring! Pros: fast, you can stop and resume whenever you want, you can find torrents of mostly anything, easy to download big files. Cons: unsafe without a VPN (might get fined), a bit harder to understand, might take an hour or two to set everything up. We will get more into Torrenting right now, as it will be the main way to pirate things.

How to Torrent files? You will need: a Torrent Client, a VPN (optional, recommended), and either a .torrent file or a magnet link. Don't panic, this is easy! Torrent Client: a little software that will actually manage the downloading. There is no reason to use anything else than qBittorrent: it's free, open source, frequently updated, has no ads, and has a neat little feature that we will see later. Download and install it and you're all set! VPN: ok, so. You *can* download things without a VPN. I've done it a bunch. Please know, it's unsafe. VPNs are, like, the condoms of piracy. Depending on how strict your Internet Service Providers are about piracy, without them you might get a hefty fine, or simply a warning, or nothing at all. With torrenting, sadly, ISPs can kind of exactly see what you're downloading. VPNs fool your ISP. I'm not a fan of how much VPN services are fooling us in thinking we need them - but sadly us pirates DO need them. I would personally not recommend free VPNs, they aren't too reliable in my experience. I also advice to use a VPN that allows "port forwarding" as that will make the downloads faster. The most loved VPN service in the pirating community is Mullvad. It's VERY secure, actually cares about your privacy (unlike Nord, or even Proton sadly), has no yearly plans to rope you into nasty subscription models. It's so privacy oriented that you don't even need an email, they will simply give you an account number and you will use that. They do NOT want your data. Super neat! Their service is 5€ a month, and I suggest paying only one month, downloading a shitton of stuff, and then just leaving it be until you need another month of downloading bonanza. You will see they accept and encourage crypto payments. Please don't judge them too harshly for this. I hate crypto as much as the next tumblr user - but this is not for crypto bros, this is because they really would like to not have your data if possible. There's people who want to avoid leaving behind any sort of trail showing that they, personally, purchased a VPN, and this option serves them. Torrent files, magnet links: a torrent file is an actual file you download and open in your client. You download "bee_move.torrent", open it in qBittorrent, and it will start downloading! A magnet link simply bypasses having an actual file. it's a link that you will directly open in your client and will tell it what it needs to know, and acts in place of a .torrent file. They're virtually the same. There are dedicated torrent sites that let you search for the torrent you want, and offer either a torrent file or magnet download. Let's see how to find them!

Where to find stuff? r/piracy Megathread - there are links to pirate anything that could be pirated. Navigate to the section you need and follow the instructions! There are usually both Torrent sites and direct download links. The masterpost isn't being mantained anymore - as of 31/10/2022, I'm still having luck with it and finding it a great resource. There are other masterposts though. For example, the Awesome Piracy megathread and the r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH wiki. As of April 2023, it’s being rewritten!! Hell yeah!! Go check it out! But some of the torrent sites listed on the masterposts are broken! :( I hear ya, I hear ya! It's perfectly normal. For technical / legal reasons that I cannot comprehend, torrent sites need to change URLs often. This is where unblockit comes in. I'm not sure how it works, so I'm just going to say that it's magic. It gives you working links to all the best torrenting, streaming, DDL sites. From books to music to, uh, adult material. I usually refer to the masterpost to know which sites are the most trustworthy, and then use unblockit to access them. Generally, for example, you will want to avoid ThePirateBay, and prefer 1337x instead.

ALMOST DONE!!! There's one last important thing to set. This is a safety measure, for those who use a VPN service and want to make the most of it. At times, the VPN connection you are using might falter for some seconds. These few seconds that it's not working, your torrent might still be downloading, exposing your IP address briefly and letting your ISP catch you. There is an easy and quick way to prevent this from happening. It's called binding the VPN network interface to your torrent client - it's a big name, but it means you tell your client (qBittorrent) to ONLY connect to the internet via the VPN. No VPN? No connection. No IP leakage. Linked guide above will take you a couple minutes at most.

This is the basic stuff! :D You should be able to download pretty much all you need just from this!

However, since I'm a nerd, here's some other useful things, or more niche sites.

There are tips to make torrenting with VPN faster - I gotta be honest man, I still don't understand *how* this "Port Forwarding" business works, and for some reason I cannot get it to work right now with Mullvad (previously I had North which doesn't support this feature at all). My internet is too slow for me to really mind, anyway. But you should look into it if you're using a VPN and getting slow download speeds on torrents with 20+ active seeders.

Now, this is for all the artists out there. Online-courses.club has, like, an INFINITY of art courses and tutorials, and even some software. It's INSANE, super helpful, some of these courses would otherwise cost SO much. I've been getting a lot of use out of it. They're mostly DDLs, too! I can't recommend it enough!!! Now, time for brushes. I've had a lot of difficulty finding good brushes for Procreate that didn't cost too much. This telegram channel has a neverending quantity of Procreate brushes: t.me/free_brushes. Sometimes Photoshop brushes crop up too. For some popular brushes, they ask for "donations" to download them instead of giving the actual download, which is a big yikes honestly. Thankfully, it's rare. In there, if you scroll really far, there's also a link to another smaller group to download Max Ulichney's brushes.

My favourite way to pirate and share music is Soulseek, a neat little software that work as a Peer To Peer service, but between you and a single other person at a time. You share all your music folder, and others can download from it when you're online. In return, you can download other people's music from their shared folders. It's lovely, the quality of the files is GREAT, the community is actually really chill and honest, since it's just a bunch of peeps sharing mp3s and flacs.

There's also a LOT of telegram bots to download music or videos from several platforms. @MusicDownloaderRobot downloads from Spotify, @joeymusicbot from Deezer, @mediadownbot rips videos and music from stuff like reddit, tiktok, facebook, twitter etc, and t.me/BotsArchive has a vast collection of bots just like these. They can come in handy! Lastly, since I am Italian, here's some resources to find italian material. Those around my age or older might remember TNT Village as the n.1 source of italian torrents. It's closed down, but the magnet links for archived stuff are still out there. Only way to access them that I found rn is this Telegram bot: @tntvsearchbot. Source code here for those who understand this stuff. There's also programmiedovetrovarli, great resource for famous software (Adobe, Office, etc) with instructions in italian. Needs adblocker to be deactivated on their site, but has no popup ads, just standard banners.

Well, this was a lot! Thank you for reading, I hope I was able to help in some way!

Please remember: illegal does not automatically mean unethical, or immoral. Everyone is free to choose what to do and think about piracy. Don't ruin this for those who choose to engage with it, and don't push this on those who'd rather steer clear. I am personally sharing this with you, because my personal opinion is that pirating is often moral, and avoiding giving money to certain corporations (Adobe and Disney come to mind) is always preferred when you can't or don't want to outright avoid and boycott their products altogether.

If you can afford to, always support small creators and artists. If you cannot afford to, then consider that pirating and enjoying their creations, then spreading the word and talking about it online, is still beneficial to them!

Share and Enjoy!

[scarecade]

i just heard the argument that all piracy is bad because its illegal and it just annoyed me so much that someone could have that stance without caring to hear any nuance to the contrary.

"its a slippery slope into pirating from small artist just trying to make a living" no the fuck it isn't. it should be fucking obvious that pirating from small indie creatives is bad and not the same as pirating from a big corporation. pirating official wizards of the coast source books is not the same as pirating kobold press source books. i don't know how you can equate the two at all.

[i-am-a-secret-ssshhh]

My mom, upon seeing me opening my laptop in the dining room: What are you doing?

Me, without missing a beat: Committing piracy.

Her:

[msnihilist]

It's all on Amazon. There are free places to watch it, but I would never suggest going to kimcartoon.li (make an account, it's free and they never send you emails + the account lets you download episodes so that you can watch them on demand without ads whenever you want forever) and typing "Fairly Oddparents" into the search bar to see every episode and special.

Does anyone know where I can watch the original "Fairly Oddparents?" I kind of want to rewatch it.

[nthflower]

Readcomicsonline commenters I can excuse media illiteracy but please don't be that much of a bigot omg

[shiftperception]

he would not fucking say that (me writing an email)

[atlas-affogato]

Its funny to me that corporations think people will jump through hoops to use their shitty platforms instead of just pirating

This is still some bullshit. We actively used to watch Freeform and FXX. Thank goodness for Roku and Hulu (which I fully understand is under The Mouse, I choose to ignore that, for now.)

[real-fire-emblem-takes]

"Piracy is a victimless crime" fuck that i hope Nintendo feels pain every time i play my thracia 776 rom

.

[apersnicketylemon]

FBI WARNING

Piracy is not a victimless crime!!!

Ooooooh the poor billionaires! Whatever will they DooooOOOOOOoooooo?

[maybe-in-another-universe]

i am feeling very upset and betrayed about the neil gaiman allegations :( (upset about neil, not about the women coming forward) in the meantime, it’s important to put a hold on consuming his content, because there is no separating the artist from the work.

in other news, piracy is not a victimless crime. (don’t be shy steal that shit)