Piracy is theft. When you pirate you are stealing from creators and inventors by depriving them of their income while you create nothing. Piracy isn’t just illegal, you are also a bad person if you do it. You are hurting a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate that made $5bn in net profits last year alone. That $5bn in net profit was made by Disney, who’s spent decades lobbying for massive expansion of copyright laws around the world. And in that process, copyright today encapsulates so much that it destroyed the very concepts of other fundamental rights – like the right to repair, freedom of speech and the right to ownership itself.
In this essay, I want to argue that you should not feel sorry for pirating from a media conglomerate, or a big tech streaming service, or a giant game publisher. And not only should you not feel sorry, you should feel proud to do it. Even if piracy is illegal, it as an act of rebellion so important doing it is your moral and civil duty.