The arguments around piracy are less about legality (in most places its copyright infringement which is NOT “stealing” but is illegal). Its more the moral and ethical arguments. Is it moral for a service to remove something that you’ve paid for? Is it ethical for people, through no fault of their own, to not be able to afford entertainment. Is it moral for large corporations to price gouge and continuously Make Line Go Up while offering a continuously worse product? Is it moral to copy software not available in your country? Is it ethical for companies to force people into subscriptions for the sole purpose of making more money when they already have loads? Is it ethical to pirate when companies refuse to support the operating system you have? Is it moral to copy software when the company that makes it is not just unethical but has been found to be taking part in things like genocide? Is it ethical for huge corporations to manipulate democracy and laws to serve their profits at the expense of everyone else? Is capitalism itself ethical?

Most people I know who are anti-pirate just lack an understanding of why people engage in copyright infringement. Calling people “scum” and “thieves” without understanding the very big moral and ethical considerations behind what drives people to piracy is reductionist, ignorant and Othering for the sake of self-superiority.

Not saying that your partner thinks that way, just that its a very common example of thinking that misses the important points and that its not just about what’s legal and what’s not (because there are many things that are or have been illegal that are completely unethical.)

I keep meaning to sign up so now is as good time as any!

Last time I used Acrobat via WINE, it was more work than it was worth to get stable and running without issues :/

I tried doing print to PDF but it flattened the resultant PDF so the layers were lost. Almost all of the software I used to try converting altered the PDF layout in some way and patterns must not change at all, otherwise they get messed up :/

I was already able to remove the edit password with qpdf --decrypt. Most of the PDF editors I used, changed the PDF too much (e.g. added margins/padding) which ruined the very specific layout needed for the patterns to work. There has to be no changes to the PDFs apart from removing the ‘footer’ text :/

Not entirely sure I understand what you mean but in addition to the suggestion of WordPress, all the plugins must be licensed as GPL as well. So all the paid for plugins can be obtained and legally used without paying. You will however have to forgo support and automatic updates on most.

I would suggest the WordPress section on babia.to

Technically its illegal in New Zealand (after the great John Key and The Hobbit saga) but the ISPs don’t give a shit. Never used a VPN and only got one letter just after the law took effect. Nothing since. So many people here do it it’s unenforceable.

As a long time poor person myself, please don’t give this sort advice. It doesn’t help. When your poor, getting something like OPs competition win can make life feel not so glum. What you’re saying is to sell happiness for slightly more security that will only last so long. Once the extra runs out, you’re back where you were with zero ability to buy that ‘luxury’ back. Having something nice when your poor can make a big difference to mental health.

Also please don’t assume that poor people don’t know how to budget and that they need unsolicited financial advice from strangers who don’t have any idea what their day to day circumstances and finances are.

Couple this with SLDL which can use Spotify URLs. I haven’t used it (yet) but was recommended to me for the same thing you’re wanting to do.

https://github.com/fiso64/slsk-batchdl

This is kinda what we do. But in our case we use both because personal storage is not cheap in this country and thus our self-hosted storage is limited. All out favourites that we watch repeatedly stays on the home server but we use Stremio and Torbox (because no way we’re going to use RD after theyb doxed customers) for one offs, shows were trying out, etc.

And yet I was saying just today there’s no way I’d go to the movies to see it anyway… Because Microsoft. Yet another example of how they’d never get money anyway but no doubt there’ll be another article claiming they lost billions from the leak or some bs

Or buy a Kobo instead and it just works. Bonus, no money to Amazon at all.

Are you OK? The Thought Police haven’t made DISCUSSING or TALKING about piracy illegal yet.

Unfortunately not everyone has access to cheap storage so for us a few bucks a month is more cost effective than having to upgrade expensive storage regularly. 😓