Everyone knows it’s “wrong”, yet so many of us still do it. In the underground music world, sometimes it feels like there’s no other choice. How do we make sense of doing something that’s technically illegal, but still feels morally right?
Introduction
Many beginning artists might remember the first cracked VST they downloaded. In the moment they might’ve told themselves: “I’ll pay for it when I can.”. This isn’t rationalizing theft so much as rationalizing access. When you’re in a moment where money is tight, many producers see piracy as a detour rather than the final path they’ll be taking.
Main content
Piracy isn’t a free pass. When you pirate, you violate copyright laws, undermine developers' work and rob corporations of sales (though the latter might be more myth than truth). From a purely legal point of view, many arguments condemn piracy as unethical (Bytescare, n.d). But in practice moral judgement isn’t so black and white. Chan et al. (2009) describes the four-component model of moral reasoning: recognition (is piracy seen as a moral issue?), judgement (is it judged permissible), intention (do you intend to pirate) and behavior. Interestingly, their study found that even when people recognized piracy as infringement, they didn’t always see it as morally wrong. People often compartmentalize, especially when their motive comes from necessity instead of greed. Big corporations often claim piracy costs them millions of dollars in “lost revenue.”, they do this by counting every pirated copy as a sale. But this argument assumes every pirate was able to afford their software in the first place, which is very rarely true. Research shows that there’s little consistent evidence that piracy does lead to lower sales. In some industries, it might even boost exposure (Oberholzer-Gee & Strumpf, 2010). Many wouldn’t have actually purchased the software anyway. Claiming a “lost sale” is literally like saying you lost a customer who never even existed in the first place! These corporations already make massive profits (looking at you, Adobe), and their anti-piracy campaigns only punish paying users more than they do pirates through DRM (Smith, 2008; Electronic Frontier Foundation [EFF], 2008) Piracy may be illegal, but when there’s a system in place that controls access to software and locks creativity behind an unrealistic paywall, you could also call it resistance. When a young artist simply wants to experiment and downloads a cracked plugin to start making music, then
that isn’t criminal, they’re simply exploring their interests (imagine paying 1000 USD as a teenager just to find out you aren’t interested.) That doesn’t make it fully right, but it does make it feel right. The real “right way” to do the wrong way might be: understanding the “harm”, supporting developers when you actually can and to keep fighting for fair access. In the end, piracy isn’t really about stealing but rather about refusing to pay outrageous prices.
References:
Bytescare. (n.d.) Ethical and legal issues in software piracy. Retrieved October 8, 2025, from https://bytescare.com/blog/ethical-and-legal-issues-in-software-piracy Oberholzer-Gee, F., & Strumpf, K. (2010). FIle-sharing and copyright. Innovation Policy and the Economy, 10(1), 19-55. https://doi.org/10.1086/605852 Smith, K. L. (2008). DRM: Digital rights management or digital restrictions management? Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 45(1), 1-3. https://doi.org/10.1002/meet.2008.1450450114 Electronic Frontier Foundation. (2008, January 3). 2008: DRM continues to punish paying customers. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/01/2008-drm-continues-punish-paying-customers