Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Comment that I'm adding on a couple of friends'. One lives in Norway, one lived in India. They told me that both of these places have an issue with accessing media and other digital goods legitimately, often finding themselves willing but unable to pay for something (I was surprised to hear this about Norway — my friend speculates that Norway is small enough that it might simply be forgotten about when big media companies negotiate rights). They both said that VPNs and piracy are way more normalised in their home countries, because it was either that, or miss out on loads of stuff.

Feel it's useful and important to highlight that the degree to which piracy is normalised depends on where you are.

I would not teach them safe piracy but rather safe computer literacy and usage.
Exactly like you said: How to spot fake ads or scams etc..
But if my child would like a book from XYZ and they would pirate it I would question the motive instead of getting it from, for example, a library.
Doing illegal shit out of convenience (like pirating a book instead of showering, getting out and enter a library searching for it) is still illegal. Even if you juat read what you want and put the book back in the shelf.

I would also firewall the shit of the little buggers computer. Also no account with admin/sudo rights.

I’m a capitalist but even I think visual media needs a come to Jesus. If they had adopted the Spotify model everyone would be a lot happier. I would be paying for content still. Instead they broke up into a dozen different services with walled content. This is so stupid. I have no qualms keeping my own collection when this is the paid offering.

i would teach my kids that piracy is the natural market force to push corpos and companies into ethically (or at least more ethically) distributing content.

I would also teach my kids that if one were to pirate media, they should also find a way to support whoever it came from directly, assuming it's a band or small artist, rather than something like a TV show, where it'll make no difference.

Sonarr/Radarr etc make it very easy and safe for media, but apps and games would be more of a serious sit down and talk kind of situation as more can go wrong there.

I would if I had them.

It’s always advisable that you teach people how to use anything safely.

This really seems like a non-question. What is there to debate?

I'm not sure. I don't plan on having kids, so this is a purely theoretical question that I won't have to answer in practice, but I think I probably would, at least to some degree.

I had a pretty iconically millennial childhood when it comes to tech; I remember my mum being on the phone to the internet people and asked "he's offering me an unlimited packaged for [money] extra. Is that good, do we need that?", to which my brother and and I vigorously nodded. We were young enough we didn't know shit, but unlimited sounded good and we weren't paying the bills. My mum probably realised we didn't know what unlimited Vs metered internet meant in practice, and opted for unlimited as the safe option, because if she felt the need to ask her children for advice, she wouldn't be great at managing a metred connection. That's the context in which I grew up and is why I'm as techy as I am today.

I learned the hard way, and whilst I don't think that's necessarily the best way to learn, I don't know how one might teach people how to recognise which "download" button to press, and when a dodgy looking site is actually dodgy. It's like internet street smarts, but what that means has changed since I was a kid, and I don't necessarily know how I'd teach that beyond the basics, like installing adblockers and other common sense things.

They'll learn on their own when asked to pay hundreds of dollars for a single textbook.

Speaking personally I don't know if its something I'd bring up to them, but if the topic comes up naturally I'd be honest about doing it and my moral reasoning for doing so. If the kid shows an interest or a curiosity about it then we can sit down and I'd teach them my ways. I took some stupid risks while I was still learning that I'd like to spare them from taking. Besides as you said it is technically illegal and if they are going to do it then it's best that they be doing it safe. Especially seeing as they would likely be doing it in your home.

Children playing on a computer unsupervised has to have rules and boundaries (and physical backups). No, I'm not going to teach children, who are not even in their teens, to download or install anything, ever, unless I want them to learn about ransomware specifically.

It lead me to learn so much about servers and automation as well as everything I've learnt from material I've acquired

If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing.