Are they pirates if they paid for it? Police working on behalf of corpos for chilling effect. I’m paying for YouTube and watch pirated content hosted there all the time.

Yeah, fair use apparently doesn’t work the same way in France. Regardless of this consumers can still claim they thought they were purchasing a legitimate product. Do you check if YouTube has rights to videos you’re watching there? Am I liable for watching Star Wars Holiday Special on Youtube?

Given that everyone is innocent until proven guilty, an excuse can be all it takes sometimes, especially in a civil suit.

Sure, but the users of the service could also claim they got scammed with a counterfeit product. Those selling the service are the only ones worth pursuing from the practical and ethical standpoint.

I never realised how things are different in Poland when it comes to this. Around here you’d get away with downloading pretty much anything except software which is explicitly excluded from our fair use laws. You can share full copies of audio, video and text among close group of friends / relatives legally so if persecution happens it’s usually against those uploading torrents or selling piracy services where it’s easy to make a case that it wasn’t fair use.

It might be called something different but without fair use principles you wouldn’t be able to quote, review or parody a movie. This intent isn’t known by the persecutors ahead of time, hence what they’re doing is rather overzealous (an euphemism for police working for corpos).

It never ceases me to amaze me there are countries that try to go after those downloading since it’s much harder to determine if it was done within fair use boundaries.

If only there was a website with Fast and Reliable Video Game Collections.

To keep their membership in WTO. Even if the US exerts massive influence over WTO it’s still the only general trade agreement most countries recognise.

If you live in a country that makes telecoms monitor traffic then those have a benefit of not requiring a VPN (because you’re not uploading anything and they usually go for those seeding).

There are also nitter-like services for Instagram. I have a forwarder extension in my web browser set to redirect IG links to https://imginn.com/. I can’t say how advanced it is because my use case is opening memes from a single person.

How else would you engage in a foreplay with your laptop?

I have ThinkPad at work which is pleasant enough to touch due to rubberised plastic but wanking with it sounds tricky because of how stiff it’s hinges are.

Does that make it legal? Cool.

There’s Kodi in WebOS brew appstore. I’ve only ever used Kodi for offline media libraries but as far as I know there’s plenty of third party Kodi addons for this kind of piracy.

I rarely pirate stuff on Mac but I’ve had this saved in my bookmarks: https://www.torrentmac.net/

More obscure stuff might not be well seeded but I haven’t found anything better.