alt Hacker NewsIn my experience, real pirates have a strong code of ethics. I've never seen a pirate site that didn't at least say "buy it if you like it". Leechers are a different story, but to be fair most of them just don't have the money to buy the stuff they download.
To cut a long story short, I'd personally say pirating is bad if you have the money to buy it and you don't just pirate to try first, whereas if you don't have the money it's okay (permissible) and doesn't take away any sales.
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Lol the vast majority of pirates are not paying for anything. Maybe a very wealthy and ethical person is fine paying for something after they've sampled the pirated version but a good chunk of the world never had the money to afford buying it in the first place. There's plenty of ways to sample media nowadays that doesn't involve piracy, there's infinite review channels on YouTube and you can often listen to new albums for the price of watching ads. Sure, I'm sure there are many pirates willing to see a movie in theaters or attend a concert because those are experiences you can't get at home. But for something like a PC game or application, the paying customer and pirate have an identical experience (excluding online multiplayer, that often doesn't work for pirated games).
Ah yes, I heard about this ‘pirate code’.
Only I got the impression the Code is more what you'd call guidelines than actual rules
That doesn't accord with my experience. I've been involved in academic book piracy since the early millennium, and there definitely was no "buy it if you like it" ideal. Virtually no one will spend the 100-400€ that a typical scholarly book costs except libraries. And since this was a community that reads heavily outside their research as well, once works of fiction started to be more heavily hosted on these servers, it came to seem a waste to ever actually spend money on media if you could just read it all for free -- nevermind that a lot of users were in the former USSR or the Third World where media was not available for sale locally even if you wanted to spend the money.