• "Abandonware" — IP held by a company that wants to just sit on it and never release it again, and probably forgets it exists. Probably the company that produced the IP was acquired and shut down by the company currently holding it. It's nearly impossible to find a physical copy of most of this kind of stuff. I'm not a collector; I don't want to pay $1000 for the only surviving copy of some old book or NES cartridge or whatever. (Or, rather, I would, but only as part of a group-buy with the goal of giving the thing to a digital archivist who will properly preserve it and publish the results to everyone.)
• "Isolationism-ware" – IP that only legally exists in some particular markets. Usually meaning "some Asian country, and no English-speaking countries." To acquire such, I'd—at the easiest—have to convince the iTunes Store that I have a credit card with an address in that country; for the more indie stuff, I'd have to find someone physically in the country willing to go be my proxy, searching used book-stores/record-stores for the item and then sending it to me. Either way, I'd then have to work pretty hard to consume the thing, given that I don't fully understand the languages involved. Translated release groups handle all these steps. (I wouldn't mind if I could donate money to them in a way that would in turn give money to the original IP owner; I've just never heard of such a setup.)
Recently I asked a friend to keep an eye out for issues of a British magazine of the 1970s / 80s. That he might encounter in charity shops or on eBay, for example.
This week he mentioned to me that he noticed many of them have been scanned and torrented. I've never downloaded a torrent before but this looks like a great opportunity.
So my quandary is: who could I legally pay for an equivalent resource? Many of the authors are now dead and the publisher went bankrupt.
There's is no legal way to watch the latest season of Game of Thrones etc. in my country. Even if it was, I'm sure it would be overpriced compared to local economy. Same for computer games, they cost 40-50 Eur in a country where the average wage is less than 600 Eur/month.
I don’t intend to throw the first rock here – I’m battling with this issue myself. I have a low wage, can afford some things but not others, and, of course, I pirate more than I acquire legally.
But why do I? Do I really lack an alternative? There are libraries hosting cultural items of immense worth, certainly more worth than some of the contemporary items I consume, either legally or not. I could spend my whole days if I could reading, watching movies, even playing (somewhat outdated) games, all of great value, and all of this without ever spending a cent, except for maybe taking the subway to the nearest library.
Yet, I don’t do this. I crave for contemporary productions, even if they are mere distractions, not culturally enriching in any way. What’s the reason behind this? Is it societal pressure, that I want to stay in the loop? Do contemporary productions really hold this much power over me, over some of us?
There’s a way to answer to these attacks on piracy. Stop pirating. Stop trying to get what you cannot afford. Go to the library, or the museum, or the theater. Or the beach, for that matter. Just don’t consume their productions. Listen to Wagner, read some Plato, go to the park and just lie watching the clouds pass by. There’s plenty to do regardless of how much Hollywood and co. want us to pay for their productions. Plenty that, maybe, has more worth than the too-expensive-for-us modern alternatives.
But why don’t we? What’s the appeal in all modern things that leads us to such great efforts on their illicit acquisition? Are they really that valuable? And if they are, shouldn’t we pressure cultural institutions to grant everyone ways of accessing them?
Missing the point that there's not much difference legally between buying a disc and ripping it or buying a disc and then downloading it. (At least, in UK, where format shifting is not legal.)
In times like that, I would just assume the array size is +1, and ignore the first C Zero position. It's a pain but just setup something once and its done.
