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(83.8KB, 960x720) As socialists, we recognise intellectual property is a harmful artificial scarcity. As technology evolves, information has become easier to distribute. Now, with the advent of everyday computers and phones, we can share writing, pictures, videos, 3D models and even computer tools in mere seconds at effectively no cost. We have unprecedented potential to own and share knowledge, download entertainment for free, and to own the means of digital labour by using community-developed 'free and open source' tools.
Remember, if you are committing piracy in a country that attempts to stop it, always wear a VPN! Research them before picking a shit one.
SEIZE OPEN INFORMATION
The concept of libraries has been extended globally with the internet. Of course, with the complexities of international copyright law, and the difficulty of censoring distributed information, many of these are 'shadow libraries', operating without respect for bourgeois copyright law. Famous examples are Z-Library (z-lib), Library Genesis (LibGen) and Sci-Hub. Another virtual library, the borrowing system of Internet Archive, attempts to work openly and within the law, but has recently been attacked by a coalition of publisher companies.
There are also other open datasets, like the widely-used OpenStreetMap.
SEIZE ENTERTAINMENT
Don't waste money on streaming companies.
Don't waste money on film distributors.
Don't waste money on games publishers.
Get all of it for free through online piracy. In cases where you do wish to compensate a creator, donate directly to them instead of letting the distributor exploit them by taking a huge cut of the income.
The online piracy scene is active, and easy to search. Torrenting is easy to learn. Direct download are often available too. Community resources like https://rentry.co/megathread and https://rentry.co/piracy-faq will have good, neat lists of which sites to search and how to stay safe, this should help with finding anything popular.
OWN YOUR TOOLS
Not everything is copyrighted. Alternative 'free' licenses include Creative Commons licenses (for art) and GPL and MIT (for software), allowing you to share and modify content legally.
The Free and Open Source Software movement (FOSS) is a major online paradigm for making free (as in 'freedom') tools. Many of them are already popular, including Firefox, VLC, 7-Zip, Krita, Blender, Godot, Audacity, OBS, Handbrake, LibreOffice, Linux operating systems (instead of Windows/Mac) and the Android base system.
On top of tools for your own computer, many online services are based on FOSS, including Mastodon and Lemmy instances, the many tools at https://disroot.org/en/#services and even Nuclear Change (running fusion, a fork of jschan imageboard software). Other online services include alternate frontends to commercial services - Piped/Invidious, Libreddit and Nitter (for accessing YouTube, reddit and Twitter without ads or commercial tracking). If you want to download videos from sites, consider installing yt-dlp (despite the name, it works on most websites including reddit and twitter).
The FOSS movement presents an interesting overlap with the socialist ambition of seizing the means of production. While this obviously isn't going to overthrow capitalism, it does function comparably to a worker co-operative and provides highly-accessible ways to become independent of for-profit fuckery.
This also has material benefits for the anti-capitalist movement, by reducing the amount of commercial (and therefore state) tracking, allowing independent encrypted communications, by leaving platforms which encourage division, conflict and addiction, avoiding services which can secretly comply with feds, and moving away from platforms that can deplatform and censor at will, whether for their own capitalist agenda or to placate mass media flak and discontent. By creating our own independent services, we can run them as we want and to further our own wants and needs.
Last edited by discomrade