Online Piracy Almost Died. Now It's More Popular Than Ever.

Turns out people will stop caring about your property rights if you take the things thry paid for away from them. They also like things to be convenient and easy! Who knew?
- Corpo parasite think they can abuse contract law without peasants clapping back is naive.
  Also, why would I fund my enemy
  
  Uh, because not funding them is illegal and bad and you can't do illegal things because those would be crimes and its illegal to fo crime.
- They were on the right track and then greed took over yet again, injecting advertisements and making tiers. I want a video in reliable good quality, no worry about it being edited or that it will disappear, without ads. The options are buy the Bluray or pirate it, for older movies there is one option.
  
  greed
  Didn't take over. It took the mask off.

I'm not watching a whole ass video to tell me "because streaming fragmentation is worse than ever"
- Also it's unlikely it actually almost died
  
  Yeah, I don't think piracy ever came close to dying. It definitely slowed down for a small time when Netflix was the only real player in the streaming space, as a lot of pirates didn't actually mind paying for a service as long as it worked and had content. For those people, piracy was a service issue, not a cost issue.
  Now that Netflix doesn't have anything to watch and the content is spread across dozens of networks (again), piracy is back on the menu for that specific demographic. But there will always be a demo that will pirate no matter what, be it principles or be it cost.
  
  Definietly not, but it dropped from the 'mainstream' knowledge base and people who only knew screaming are 'discovering' it now.
  
  I never stopped, OG Captain from Napster and long time NZB gang.
  
  me pirating everything for the last ten years
  "it almost died?! On my watch!?"

Every one is else is doing piracy while I'm doing "digital content preservation". These companies would happily send you a letter telling you to destroy all copies of a book In your house if they had the right to. You must resist.
- I was thinking this while setting up RomM a few months back. Each media stack I'm running has a bit of a different reasoning behind it, but at the end of the day it's more about convenience and owning my own library than anything cost-related.
  My Jellyfin server exists because streaming services are a nightmare. Overpriced as hell, extremely limited libraries, things constantly coming and going.
  I use Navidrome because Spotify supports genocide and Tidal felt too limited, and neither pays artists well. While most of my library is pirated, I make it a point to buy directly from the artists whenever possible - whether that's digital downloads, vinyl, or merch, direct support goes much further than streaming services ever will.
  RomM is about preservation and convenience for my emulation library. These aren't hard to find online, sure, but knowing I have my own copies feels like a safety net in case of more shutdowns and lawsuits.
  
  While most of my library is pirated, I make it a point to buy directly from the artists whenever possible - whether that’s digital downloads, vinyl, or merch, direct support goes much further than streaming services ever will.
  You might already do this, but I'd suggest to further prioritize buying from up and coming and independent artists. You don't need to support whatever random person/corporation owns the rights to the discography of a dead musician unless you have a compelling reason to so, and you don't have to deepen the pockets of already loaded superartists/bands. Is there a Bandcamp Friday coming up, then you can wait until then to make sure a larger chunk of your money goes directly to those who made the music.
- I'm thinking the same - i for example have nearly every fitgirl release stored and backuped. there is no way i can ever play them all, but last time i checked i have quite a few games that are not available to buy anymore because they were pulled from steam/gog/epic. sometime in the future i will work on making all of these games available again.

Piracy never got anywhere close to dying. TV and movie piracy dropped a bit when there were decent streaming services though.
Lots of people got used to watching what they want, when they want it. Now that the streaming services have all enshittified, loads of people are turning to piracy because it provides better service.
- In general I agree, but my understanding is that the pirate streams of live sporting events were cracked down on quite hard. There was definitely a dip at one point where the high quality SopCast and Ace Stream broadcasts that had become very popular for competitions like the Premier League (e.g. Bloodzeed) disappeared quite suddenly and weren't replaced with anything comparable.
  
  True, good sport streams are a lot harder to find than they used to be.
- If it wasn't for piracy I would have just kept reading books. Instead, I just watch all the bullshit.
  EDIT: Most of the time, the people who make shows have a much better imagination than mine
- I get a stellar service from my mate's Plex server that he doesn't charge me to access. If there's something I want, I request it through some automated service he has and within no time at all it's ready to watch.
- Feels like there's more to it than that. But yeah, we did believe the ads and want what we were promised.
  
  Speaking personally, it's literally that. I used to pay for Netflix, HBO, Prime and Disney+, now I don't pay for anything.
  The reasons are quite simple:
  everything got more and more expensive
  some of the services started pushing ads down my throat even though I paid for them (usually the higher tier)
  So I got back to torrenting + self-hosting (had to migrate from Plex to Jellyfin because even self-hosted solutions are turning to shit).
  
  They pretty much nailed it as far as I'm concerned.

The craziest thing about online piracy is that Donald J. Trump is in the Epstein files.
- This comment made my day
  
  It made my hole weak.
  
  I clapped when I read because I agree with thing

I do have the feel that gaming piracy is on a all time low. At the moment there isn't even a single active denuvo cracker while there used to be like 3-4. Probably because stores like steam and gog, which are consumer friendly with fair prices for most products and not linked with stupid subscriptions.
On the other hand movie and shows piracy is rising for the anti-consumer platforms, who can pay $200 a month for seeing all decent shows and movies without ads? Very few people, and even then you own nothing.
I have a feel that music piracy will rise soon too. As Spotify already have started the anti consumer route. I'm pretty sure in a few years it's subscription won't be as worth it as it used to be, and a lot of people will find out that they have been paying for years and still own nothing.
- The second that valve goes public and gets horribly enshittified , it will grow exponentially.
  
  I have codex steamdrm crack at good custody for saving my library when it happens.
- Music piracy, while still a thing, is basically nil at this point, because the record industry didn't fuck up streaming (for the consumer). The artists don't get paid enough, but from a consumer perspective you don't have to sub to all the services to get all of the music.
  We were so close to that with Netflix back in the beginning. Then the studios got greedy, and here we are.
  
  Music piracy's still alive here and there. The torrents I usually find are massive FLAC files that have very little advantage over much smaller MP3s though. I might need to buy some really fancy gear to appreciate it maybe.
  
  I found the easiest way to pirate music was to just grab stuff from youtube. Maybe in the future Freetube will have an option to download whole playlists, but in my middle age I am way less likely to download the whole album for "context."
- How exactly is Steam consumer friendly? Or is the bar so low that companies that don't shoot themselves in their feet by mistake because they were actually aiming for the customer are considered "consumer friendly"?
  
  The bar is, indeed, very low. By comparison I don't feel as predated as in other shops.
  
  gog is more consumer friendly but steam is pretty good too compared to the alternatives.
  
  The fact that you can add any game to Steam is pretty consumer-friendly, I think.
- I thought that crazy terf was cracking denuvo games?
  
  Empress? She retired two years ago from cracking, and started a cult.
- I do have the feel that gaming piracy is on a all time low. At the moment there isn't even a single active denuvo cracker while there used to be like 3-4. Probably because stores like steam and gog, which are consumer friendly with fair prices for most products and not linked with stupid subscriptions.
  I don't know the numbers so I can't comment on that, but you do realise the vast majority of games don't launch with Denuvo right? And plenty of games that do only have it for the first 6-12 months because it's a subscription for them, before taking it out...
  I've played Baldur's Gate 3 and Avowed recently, pirated, right at launch, because they didn't have DRM. Isn't it still true that nothing on GOG has DRM at all?
  
  And plenty of games that do only have it for the first 6-12 months because it’s a subscription for them, before taking it out…
  Sega, Ubisoft, and Atlus being notable exceptions. They just leave that shit in forever.
- There's a workaround for Denuvo: buying a copy of the game with pooled funds and sharing the game with all the participants using online activation. It's not exactly cracking, but it is one way around it. The issue is knowing where to find such groups, or starting one yourself. I can get you into one, If anyone is interested. Just send me a PM asking to join.
  You can get older stuff for free as well. Practically everything is free, but you'll have to wait longer with the newer titles because people who donated funds take priority.
  Note: Unfortunately, this takes place in a Discord group. You'll have to use Discord and you'll have to have an account that is at least one-month old to be able to participate.
  
  Or just buy on GOG and don't buy Denuvo games.

Turns out making it easier to pay and access content (ie. Steam) actually encourages consumers to pay. Weird.
- The corpos:
  "This is outrageous! This is unfair!"
  
  Basically Epic

You know what this means. They're gonna be tightening things up as soon as they smell slowing down profit growth. If you live in a copyright haven, make sure your anon VPN, blocklists and all that are setup correctly.
- Hoping for the Netherlands!!!
- Newbie here - Can you recommend a good Linux VPN? (For totally legal Distro Torrents, of course.)
  
  Proton with https://github.com/haugene/docker-transmission-openvpn

In the professional world it's called "Distributed backups" and is recommended technique for archiving. I'm doing my bit daily at no charge to the media industry, just out of the goodness of my heart :)

It almost died when?
Any pirated content that I've looked for over the past 20 years has been easily accessible.
The only reason I've slowed down is due to the quality of today's media, not because of availability of content.
- That is called engagement farming, pretty common on YouTube, there are probably 50 videos like this released in the past month, they just copy paste from each other, each getting hundreds and thousands of views.
  The only noticeable decline in piracy came in the year when Netflix got famous, which got reverted in the next few years due to the launch of another 100 Streaming sites and netflix's enshittification.
- It definitely had a dip. Sure you could find whatever you wanted but the amount of people doing it has declined, and ease of use. Streaming when it started was to easy and people didn't bother. Now price increases and ads and stuff going everywhere, piracy is easier.
  
  There may have been a “dip” but never was it close to being moribund.
- Anime & Movie & TV streaming sites got hit pretty hard not that long ago.

bring back shareware tbh

I'm going to guess that Paramount/CBS will be filling up some hard drives, at least until they kill of all the content people wanted to watch in the first place. Paramount, the next fox news.
- Fuck Paramount solely because of the Halo show...