A genuine (limited) argument against creative software piracy

for avoidance of doubt, before it gets into this post, it does genuinely believe that moral arguments against software piracy are weak and shit. It isn't here to tell you that you should never pirate anything, or that you are a bad person for engaging in software piracy (because it does not believe either of those). The ethics of piracy are debated endlessly and everybody has their own opinions on what is or isn't over the line and it isn't here to argue for any particular perspective there. It is here to talk about a specific pattern it has seen with creative software piracy, and why it thinks that pattern is bad.

That said. Time to make an anti-piracy argument on the internet. hear it out. please. *takes a deep breath*

It thinks it might be best to start with an example of this pattern it is talking about. Let's imagine a hypothetical person who wants to get into music production. They've heard that FL Studio is good, so they grab a cracked copy of FL studio. They play around with it for a bit, and then decide that they can't get the synth tones they want with what they have played around with built in to FL, so they download cracks of serum 2 and pigments. They decide they don't like FL's built in effects and crack the fabfilter and izotope suites. They download piles of sample packs because they don't like the drum kits they have already. Then something in FL studio annoys them, so they crack Ableton live (full suite, of course, because it's free. Why would you ever crack anything other than the entire suite)? Then they run into an annoyance with Ableton and crack Bitwig studio.

It doesn't think this is a straw-man example because it has seen multiple music producers go through this exact cycle, and as a result, they never end up actually making much music. Every snag they hit, they crack a fix for that specific problem, until they are drowning in plugins, samples and tools and don't really know their way around any of them.

The endless acquisition of new stuff instead of spending time to learn what you have has a name in the music production space. GAS - Gear Acquisition Syndrome. GAS tends to be more readily apparent with hardware devices, where people end up with studios full of synths (or euroracks full of modules) that they barely touch. It can be harder to spot with software, when everything is far more abstract and doesn't take up physical space, but it has all the same impacts.

When nothing costs you money (because you're downloading cracks), it's easy to accumulate piles of plugins, sample packs, presets, or whatever else you can torrent, and never spend any time learning what you already have. It's easy to find an annoyance in your setup and switch to a completely different software package instead of learning a way around it. You don't have the problem of GAS affecting your wallet, but accumulating more and more software instead of learning to use what you already have makes you a weaker artist. It leads to terminal cases of "All the gear, no idea". As a pirate, GAS is free and it is infinite.

Imagine a musician who only spends a month playing any instrument before switching to a different one. They spend a month with the piano, a month with the guitar, a month with the oboe, a month with a modular synthesizer, etc. They would have a wide range of musical experiences, but they wouldn't get any good at any of those instruments. It would be creatively limiting for them. This is the mindset that too many electronic producers have, especially when they get all their shit for free. There's value in trying a wide range of things, but there is far more value in actually mastering the tools you want to use, and the incentives created by pirating your creative software run counter to learning and mastering your tools.

It's not here to tell you never to pirate anything. But piracy can lead to other problems creative folks already face being much worse, especially GAS. Spend time to learn what you have instead of torrenting something new. You'll be better off for it.