Piracy for Dummies

How to sail the high seas

It feels a bit like a self-report to write this, so I’ll employ the tactic of using "allegedly" when referring to certain activities. I would never, ever, ever plunder scores of digital media from the recesses of the internet and build a magnificent cloud library with serveral terrabytes in raw data.

I’ve heard all the arguments for and against piracy—why you should support the artist, how important copyright law is, etc. A true pirate doesn’t concern himself with such trivialities; there’s no point acting like we’re all saints here. I bought hundreds of books spending thousands of dollars before allegedly beginning to plunder them. It’s convenient and doesn’t cost any money. The public library app and “waiting” to borrow a book that’s just an audio file they can copy? Actually retarded system.

So, how do you pirate content? The r/Piracy megathread might be a good start to find sites for the media you want. These sites offer either direct downloads or torrenting, with torrenting usually being the safer option. Never pay for a site you’re pirating data off of—it seems obvious, but putting your name and address on an illegal site is not the best idea. Always browse in a separate private window, and use a good ad blocker and VPN before visiting the site.

Be sure what you’re clicking isn’t an ad. Ad blockers are good but not perfect, so make sure your mouse is on the correct button before clicking.

When it comes to downloading stuff, I usually download the torrent file and pull the data that way, instead of messing around with direct download stuff. A torrent is a file that provides your computer the information to download from any other computer seeding the file. Seeding, for all intents and purposes, is when another computer—whether a regular PC or a dedicated server, often called a “seed box”—has the file and sends the data to others wanting to download it. Download qbittorrent installer, and run it on your system, then you can add a torrent file, and it will start the download.

Torrenting involves all types of media: PDFs, audio, video, and anything in between. Most of my torrenting is for audiobooks and comics. I allegedly have over a terabyte of audiobooks, from all my favorite authors—books I grew up reading to new ones I’m still finding out about. Speaking of which, AI deep research tools are pretty good at finding new books. I found one of my favorite books, The Aeronaut’s Windlass, just recently from a search on Grok. These books are allegedly on a cloud drive connected to my iCloud account, where I can access thousands of books by opening the files on my phone. It’s quite rewarding escaping the clutches of DRM—everything is so much easier. Plus, libraries never have all the books I’m looking for. I just downloaded every Louis L’Amour dramatization, the old ones Beau made in the ’90s after his father died. Those are pretty hard to find anywhere else. If a book is missing, I can buy a copy and record it for my files if need be. For some reason, the second book of Atherton by Patrick Carman, Rivers of Fire, is impossible to find. I finally found a recording some guy uploaded on Spotify as a playlist and recorded it that way.

My only true love is books, but there are all sorts of other media you can download if you really want, like music, TV shows, interviews, podcasts, etc. Most of the links for that are on the r/Piracy megathread.

Anyways, great practice pirating—it saves a ton of money and is just a better way of getting media. Also, nobody is taking over your consciousness with recommended content. I have never done any of piracy related activities previously mentioned, someone else wrote this, you rat bastards can’t prove a thing.