Yarr! Welcome to the piracy thread. I’m ye captain today and I will be your guide on this journey. Let’s set sail on the seven seas of the internet and find some treasures For educational purposes only, obviously.

First of all, why?

Well, piracy have been around for a long time. It’s a way to share knowledge and culture. It’s a way to access things that are not available in your country. It’s a way to access things that are too expensive for you. It’s a way to access things that are not available anymore. It’s a cool way of life trust me…It’s a big fight between the big filthy rich corporations and the people. It’s a way to say “I don’t like your greedy business model”. BUT most importantly, it was DEFINITELY NOT intended to be a way to steal things from people. We understand that people need to make a living out of their work and we support creators as much as we can. We buy things we like when we can afford it, but life is not fair with everyone and trying to access knowledge and culture should not be a privilege.

The internet is full of many tools that the proud community of pirates have developed over the years. First we need a reliable download manager. I recommend FDM A very legal tool for not-so-legal downloads. it supports torrenting, the holy grail of piracy and it’s pretty fast. It’s a free tool so why not use it? If you expected popular bittorrent clients well not today matey!

Now, let’s find some treasures. Here are some places I found useful:

Where the community gathers

We shall start here, reddit, The front page of the internet as they used to say. there is this thing there called the megathread that have anything you might be looking for…If you want mostly english content. The most popular place known by all of us is the piratebay, Where many english torrents are found.

But the thing is that even though english is cool I need most of my things in french. So I found some good places for french content. FrancePirate is a subreddit that focus on french content. Their “tipiakeries” section is very useful. Here are my favorite findings from there

Music and videos

Lucida is a blessing from the heavens. First of all I don’t know how they get their music from such various sources but they’re doing a great job. You might want to keep this one alive so please don’t share it with everyone, support them and if you can afford it remember to also support your favorite artists by actually buying their music. Lucida have a very good collection and what I like the most is that they have correct metadata for their music. Cover, artist name and albums all included. You can download whole albums in various formats (mp3, flac, ogg) and they have a very good search engine. Damn I love this place.

Now if you are more into clean waters, free spotify is very legal for music just like soundcloud but you have to play by their big corporations rules. I won’t elaborate on those here. Audiomack is good for African music but the content is very limited. They have the weirdest remixes of popular songs you will ever hear.

There are many tools that pretend to let you download music from spotify but actually just use youtube-dl in the background…things like spotidown and spotify-downloader, converto for youtube videos and such. You can do more research on those if you want.

Movies and series

One place I found very useful is cinezone (might keep an eye on the link as those change pretty often for obvious reasons). They have a very good collection of movies and series. This is for streaming mostly but sadly no french content. voirseries is good for french series streaming but the ads are very annoying (Pick a struggle). For movies the french usually torrent them so I found yggtorrent is a very good place for french torrents but they have a weird business policy which is weird for a piracy website. They have a very good collection of french movies and series. torrent9 and oxtorrent are also pretty famous places for french torrents…just like 1337x used to be for english ones.

Books and comics

Oh wait, people still read books? Well, I found some good places for books. libgen is the big database but as usual mostly english content. bookys-ebooks is the best I found for french books. ebooksgratuits is decent. For comics comicsvf is a very good place for french comics. Tipiakeries have some good places for comics too. You might end up downloading them on a telegram channel or something.

Anime and cartoons

I found some my favorite cartoons and cartoon series on kimcartoon. This place is awesome but everything is in english. voiranime is the Go-to place for french anime. The collection is pretty huge.

Games and software

I found the games I used to love as a kid in emulation places like wowroms and r-roms and alot of other places I won’t need to mention here. They are pretty famous and a simple search will lead you to them. fitgirl is a legend and skidrow is also a very good place for videogames, but I STRONGLY recommend buying games you like if you can afford it. It helps those poor souls of game devs a lot. steam usually have good deals and epic games give some free games every week. They might be big corporations but these ones are not that bad. For software simply visit the bay of pirates and you will find decent things but beware of the albanian dolphin virus (google it, it’s funny I swear). Anything from nirsoft (Actually very useful tools for IT people but their reputation is often shaded by bad people using them for bad things. Putting them here is not very helpful for their reputation but hey, Don’t do bad things with them)

Extras

Things you would not expect people would make you pay for like wallpapers are often found for free over the internet. And also if you are a scientist and think scientists that spend months or years of their life researching should not be paid for their work (joking XD), you can use sci-hub (For science!)

Well, that’s it for now. I will update this list as I discover new tools. Curation is my passion. I like Putting things together and making them accessible. I hope you found anything useful here.