What a smart person would engage in to avoid paying exorbitant prices for 2-hour long heavily edited videos(movies) or the overpriced windows operating system. Pirates shouldn't feel bad, as their money would have gone to some megacorporation worth a few hundred billion dollars, or a millionaire living in Beverly Hills. Piracy ranges from using YouTube-to-mp3 to starting a torrenting site like the Pirate Bay. It also has a subreddit at r/piracy.

The best thing ever to happen to the music/software industry. The customer's way of telling the corporate whore fatcats that they're charging us too much for low-quality shit.

Something that enables millions of people to learn and use software you would *never* have bought for the retail price. Something people in the sw industry don't take into account...

Old usage: the act of sailing around on a huge boat with a bunch of other guys (all of whom most likely are missing either one of their legs, hands, or eyes) and raiding spanish galleons up and down whatever coast you happen to be on. This action usually involves a lot of town pillaging, treasure looting, booty stealing, cutlass weilding, ARRR! yelling, parrot having, musket shooting, rum drinking, accordion playing, cannon cannoning, and buggery.

New usage: the act of stealing music, movies, unlicensed software, etc off of the internet. Usually done through a variety of p2p clients. This practice is of course denounced by the industry and they have launched a campaign of legal action and anti-piracy media featuring the likes of M E Hart aimed at destroying piracy, but all indications as of now are that it will survive.

In both cases, piracy is awesome.

Becoming a very serious crime according to authorities because they aren't getting any money out of it unless you're a cop or something. If the authorities made a dollar for every pirated thing they'd shut up and direct our attention to reducing citizen benefits because they don't make any money out of it either.

I want Windows. I get Windows.
I want Max. I get Max.
I want lotr. I get lotr.

Then I go install linux

An unintended consequence of tormenting clients with DRM

1. A Catalyst for change.

2. The theft of ones personal property for reselling to profit.

Originating from early sailors called pirates who plundered other vessels for their goods. Todays, pirates are known also as downloaders and/or hackers (as the news media would have the general public think). Frowned upon by society, piracy has become rampant in scale via the internet and has forced authorities to arrest and prosecute the very same thing people have been doing with printing press, vcr and tape recorder since the 1920s.

Originally, piracy was a form of theft, when it referred to the practice of robbing on the high seas, and arguably even when it referred to the harmful practice of copying copyrighted products and selling them, ripping off the developers of the products.

Nowadays, it's a synonym for 'copyright infringement', which is not the same thing as theft. Copying in moderation may well benefit the industries in many circumstances as it increases public awareness of the industries and individual products; it's the mass copying initiatives, and the counterfeit sales, that are most likely eroding sales.

In cracking down on 'piracy' the copyright police are using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, and in pissing off loyal customers with intrusive 'copy protection systems', the concept of copyright law and the relevant industries are giving themselves a bad name.