After practically one year without writing, here I am writing a little bit more.
What happened over the course of this past year?
A lot of things, especially a lot of AI shit, a lot of exhaustion dealing with the enshitification in the stuff I use, and above all, being extremely tired of MacroHard making more garbage every day while I have to deal with that garbage.
It’s funny that I’m getting closer to Linux more and more, and I’m starting to revisit old ideas. So let me have a little chat here:
Piracy is wrong, very wrong!
That said, let me elaborate on what I think today. For those who don’t know me, I am a fervent anti-piracy advocate, and I still believe that engaging in piracy is wrong, and I will not accept it. However, today I see things a little differently, I see that the problem is not piracy but rather copyright.
When we create something, we have a guarantee that is ours forever. The problem is that for a company, forever is eternal, companies are not people, companies do not die, and when you consider that a human being lives an average of 80 years, with 20 of those years not really being productive, copyright lasts for practically 60 years. That’s quite a long time, it would take a decade for a deconologia to physically move from one side of the continent to the other on horseback.
But what about when we have something faster than horses, something like the speed of light? Ok, ok, not the speed of light, but something very close to it. Ten years become nothing, and 60 years become a lot more time. What am I trying to say?
When copyright laws started, 50 years was more or less a good period of time. A technology released today will, probably, becaome obsolete in 10 years.
More and more, this is becoming a reality, and the process of enshitification is growing increasingly faster. For example, if you use a platform like Discord, it turned 10 years old in 2025. And look at this: this year it is really embracing the idea of becoming trash. What I mean is that in less than 10 years, it went from being a tool I love, to “it still works, so it’s okay,” to needing to find an alternative to this trash.
This is just the most recent example, but everything has a short shelf life. Now I ask you, once Discord turns to trash and dies, which will take a few more years, what will all this code, all this knowledge generate? Nothing, right? It will just turn back to dust.
Now let me give you another example: MacroHard has definitively killed Skype, and why doesn’t that damn company decide that it’s time to let go of this app it no longer cares about (the very reason it’s being killed) and allow it to become open-source, releasing it so others can make good use of it, even if only for learning? The reality is they won’t do that because, in a few years, they might decide it’s time to bring it back and we’ll have Skype again.
Now let me tell you:
What if copyright were only for 10 years?
In 10 years, there is enough time to make a lot of money, after that, it becomes public, available for the rest of humanity to enjoy, and this applies to everything. Music, movies, anime, games, software, my c%&K… everything. Let everything be limited to 10 years. If it doesn’t turn a profit in 10 years, something is wrong.
“But my medical research took 200 years to arrive at that perfect chemical compound that cures cancer, AIDS, and baldness all at once.”
So, sell it for billions, and after 10 years, once the investment is recouped, it’s time to release it to the public. And now, whoever makes a better product based on it will resolve the issue. More and more I realize how much this could propel humanity forward. Imagine the amount of things we could create in 50 years, think of the quantity of good music that could exist, think of the remixes of old stuff being made today.
The open-source movement is not just a good idea—not only because it makes clear what is happening behind the scenes, but it also allows other people to make small changes that make sense to them. Linux is a great example of that, we can complain that there’s a new distro every day, but the truth is that I’m happy to have PuppyLinux, because I know that when I need a super small distro, it will be there to help me.
I know that I have Arch (by the way) on my server here at home, and I’m the hypocrite for saying this while writing on a MacBook, but still, I love Linux—so much so that I have Alpine running alongside on my phone in case of need.
Okay, now that I’ve stopped talking about the utopian world, what has changed in my view on piracy?
Piracy is only acceptable if there is no legal distribution and/or if you already have the rights to the work.
Why am I becoming morally flexible? Because every day we lose more of our ability to own something, we are increasingly ceasing to exist as independent beings and living in a dystopia where very few have all the means while many go hungry. Perhaps that is what many of the works I read were talking about, but I had to go through the suffering to understand.
And remember, kids, piracy is wrong—you should not do it. This is just my reflection, and I do not intend to influence anyone.
I would go even further. Take Linux, for example, it uses copyleft (programmers never cease to surprise me with their jokes). This type of license means that if you modify the Linux kernel, you must also release your changes publicly. I used to think this was a load of bullshit, why should anyone care about that when the whole idea of the project is:
Here is the code. It works on my machine; if it doesn’t work on yours, that’s “you” problem, not “mine”.
With that mentality, why shouldn’t the person who fixes the code receive proper recognition for their effort? I felt it was unfair how this was handled. Now I completely understand after witnessing this pull of the rug from Google, the only positive aspect of Linux is that the kernel will remain available. As usual, mega-corps keep finding ways to become even more malevolent over time.
Every day, we inch closer to the dystopian world our authors warned us about, yet these big companies seem to draw inspiration from it rather than heed the warnings.
I think that it for today. Hopefully you got something from this free text, after all if you didn’t it’s a “you” problem.
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