I owe my entire life to piracy.

I learned all I know on pirated software, and all the jobs that I've ever held are entirely attributable to it.

Did I shaft the software vendors I pirated the software of? Absolutely. But! I'm also very well paid and I pay a lot of taxes thanks to my ill-gotten skills. So overall, I contributed to society as a whole orders of magnitude more than I stole from the individual software vendors.

Of course, I recognize that this sort of logic is self-serving and leaves the software vendors I shafted without any money. But... just sayin'. There's more than one face to this coin.

As for media - music, movies and such, I've almost never purchased any. I bought a few LPs as a kid before my parents bought me a cassette player (and more importantly, recorder). After that, I never ever paid a single dime for any media I've ever consumed. Never. And I still don't.

I make no apology for this: it's theft pure and simple. The only weak justification I can offer is that if I tried to purchase music or movies, it would be inconvenient to procure, DRM'ed, force shit I don't want to watch down my throat, like those stupid unskippable FBI warnings on DVDs, and the pirated versions of mp3s and movies are much more user-friendly and resistant to time and deprecation. But at the end of the day, I fully admit that I'm a shameless freeloader.

The only thing I pay for religiously is books. No particular reason why I respect writers more than musicians or film directors... It's just like that. I want writers to get paid.

Depends. If we take from when I was a kid? Probably something in the hundreds of thousands or even in the millions. I pirated pretty much everything because I lived in a very small town with no electronics shop so I couldn't even buy games.

However, in the last 8 years or so? I find that I rarely pirate games anymore. Bundles, steam sales and refunds allow me to buy without worrying about liking the game.

Music is also something I don't pirate anymore. I'm not one needing thousands of tracks, but rather a small and select collection. So I occasionally buy from bandcamp or other services so I can keep the music I want in my jellyfin server.

Films and shows are a different thing tho. At home whave netflix, so for most stuff we go there, but if something's not there, I'll pirate it. So... idk but... some hundreds? I'm not a fan of movies and most of the stuff I watch (which is not a lot) is on netflix.

Hard to tell, guesstimate €1,500.

I really only download music, mostly individual songs. I use sites like himovies.to for movies, and then if I like something enough, I buy a DVD, if available.
And some few "mod apks", which yes, are a bit shady. I don't know how to do that myself, so I just run them through VirusTotal and hope for the best if it's all green (false negatives). Stuff like KineMaster because I am procrastinating to learn using Kdenlive, MLUSB Mounter and some games.

I haven't purchased any media or software (excl. donations) that doesn't come on a physical medium.

I think for books its easier to attribute credit to one person compared to like dozens of actors and extra crew to make a city scene in the movie look populated, or like multiple members of a band. Books are just one person responsible for all of it. If the author is good you support them. Where as, sometimes a movie is good, but then one of those producers/script-writers/actors turns out rotten with bad politics (like bigotry) then your support is kinda of goes towards their royalties and fame. With one person, its much easier to research their politics to support them, and simultaneouly easier to organize a boycott writers for their bigotry.

I see no problem with learning to use some expensive software by pirating it only to then get a job using that software (paid with a corporate license). Before many companies had "education editions" of software, that was how you learned.

How do you even start to quantify something like a TV show? Without piracy would you have had subscription services, seen it free when it came on local TV and/or bought a box set of it? Similar situations exist for other media too, which "full price" are we talking about?

Nice try FBI.

Outdated image, these days we just remote into the FBI office, no FBI jacket needed.

This kind of thinking is what the mpaa and others want pirating framed as. Very very little of what's pirated would have been paid for at all had it not been available. I've paid to see sequels for movies that have pirated and have bought books based on series I've downloaded that I never would have bothered to explore if I had to buy them originally.

This is tough to answer, because a lot of pirated stuff is literally priceless, i.e., can't be bought at all.

I'd be happy to pay for the recent Ace Combat 5 and 6 upscaled ports, but they were only available briefly with preorders for AC7 on consoles I don't have. They haven't been sold outside of that brief window several years ago. Even if you tracked down unopened copies from 2019 and bought them from third parties, the license codes they contained expired long ago.

Fortunately, the Ace Combat community has put a lot work into making emulation work. The older games are playable, just not in a way you can pay money for.

Unclear. Cause I don't tell

Pay what? A physical copy? A digital license for streaming on a platform? A digital rental? A month of streaming service that includes it? Taking free access and public libraries (like public broadcasting libraries), temporary or time-limited into account? There's way too much variance to make any reasonable assessment on this.

To get an idea of price variance, even without monthly services, which make individual consumption cheaper still, let's look at the value of digital products on Steam.

Comparing my Steam account value calculated by SteamDB, the "lowest value" is 23% of the "value today". Taking into account that prices reduce significantly over time, you could put it much lower.

How do you expect people to calculate "if you had to pay for every item"?

There are games like Divinity Original Sin 2 that were so good I bought them after I finished them. So.. hard to tell.

Same here. I like to fall out for so much, I bought it after I had around 6000 hours in it.

Depends. Do we count in-app purchases of apps I've modded or obtained pre-modded? Do we count the cost of films as one-off rentals/purchases, or do we count them as subscriptions?

If we consider games as buying one-off licences for them that I kept in perpetuity, it would be in the few hundreds, probably about £400.

If we include streaming, as a subscription service that I've used for the last decade roughly, then 10×12×£10 (assuming a tenner a month), we're looking at £1,200 saved for streaming.

However, at least 20-30 films have been downloaded by me personally, so assuming a cost of about a fiver per film (idk how much films go for these days), we're looking at another ~£700.

But also, we have to include ad-free YouTube as YT Premium. And even if we're to assume that YT Premium is anywhere close to the service I provide myself with, i.e downloading things I actually keep as digital files forever, it would still cost a lot. About 5 years of YT Premium would be (according to ChatGPT because I didn't want to research price increases), just over £800.

But I've also watched both Netflix and Disney+ exclusives, namely Squid Game and The Mandalorian, so I guess streaming would've been much more expensive?

Also, we have about a year of Spotify, which ChatGPT (easier to give more accurate estimates) claims is just over £140.

Adding to that, apparently the cost of Netflix over the same period is just over £1,500, so that changes the total.

So far, £3500, not counting in-app purchases in modded games. If we count that (which is ridiculous cuz I would never spend that much money on games, even if I was a liquid trillionaire (meaning having £1T cash)), we'd probably be looking at something in the hundreds of thousands if not millions.

As a compulsive datahoarders, millions, more ?
It really depends if you include only stuff I actively enjoyed, or just each single instance of a copy I made, every torrent I've seeded.

What is the point of being in the FBI if you're not going to wear the jacket?

Somewhere in the ballpark of 7 million

Nice try, FBI