Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Oddly pessimistic. From what ive seen, piracy has increased thanks to subscription services

I've been hearing pessimism like this for over 20 years and yet all I can see is that piracy is always increasing and becoming even more accessible

The downfall of movie, TV and music piracy was cheap streaming. The downfall of cheap streaming brought piracy back.

Piracy is easier than ever IMO. 20 years ago it was messy, and full of viruses and fake content. Nowadays there's plug&play pirate services with refined content.

There's so much people in the world today convinced that their subscriptions are worth it that I think they'll let pirates coexist in peace, because they know pirates wouldn't pay for it anyways.

Piracy will end when copyright ends.

No; Piracy won't stop.

Analog loopholes still exist; and cannot be eliminated completely from the chain. Enterprising crackers will tinker and find weaknesses in systems. People will find bypasses, workarounds, and straight up just crack whole encryption schemes that were badly implemented.

Encryption was never intended to protect content. It was intended to protect people. In the short term; sure, DRM and encryption can protect profits. In the long term, it provably cannot and does not. Oftentimes it gets cracked or goes offline; and the costs associated with keeping authentication servers up for long enough to keep lawsuits off your back is provably large and difficult to scale. I would even assert that it costs more to run DRM than it saves anyone in 'missed profits'.

Frequently companies also argue that it saves profits by recapturing "lost sales"; but that's provably false. A consumer, deprived of any other viable choice, will in fact, just not buy the thing if they cannot buy it for what they deem as a fair price. It has also been proven; that if they can acquire the content freely; they will oftentimes become far more willing to buy whatever they acquired or even buy future titles. When a customer trusts; they may decide to purchase. But why should a customer trust a company that does not trust them?

Lol, torrents aren't going anywhere. Decentralized and entrenched as fuck.

This is your brain on torrentfreak.

Keep sharing the tapes.

Paid research papers - Maybe, and that'd be kinda nice if it happened.

Games - Nah that'll continue on as it has, some get cracked and some don't, it is what it is.

Movies - No way. Torrents and Usenet have been here for how long now? They'll be around for longer than any other methods. Frankly this applies to everything, but especially movies.

Music - Ironically the only form of piracy I almost did watch die. Nobody was doing it really for a few years there because spotify was "just so convenient" but then they thankfully shit the bed and now it's back in a BIG way.

Books - It'll be another game of whack-a-mole. Those three go down more will pop up (though I hope those three just stay up!) There's also IRC to pirate books from, too, and those have been running for like 30yr.

Applications - This is dangerous as hell, you guys have fun I guess. Imma be over here using FOSS.

Android apps - Not the safest either really, but there are packs of them on private torrent trackers that'll continue for a long while still.

News - Yeah paywalls are a bitch, sometimes you can kill em with UbO, sometimes they've been archived for free on archive, this is honestly the hard one here.

Porn - Fat chance. Idk what you're talking about with the "porn piracy scene being small,” there are so many torrent sites both private and free and of course don't forget Usenet, and even sites dedicated to leaking camgirl footage. Maybe it just seems small because even pirates can be embarrassed about porn lol, but trust me there's plenty!

Sure, indexers can be taken down, like RARBG. So you can share torrent files on slsk (I've downloaded some rarbg torrents from there after rarbg's collapse), or another site can pop up and host them either on the clearnet or on i2p. Torrenting may go somewhere technically speaking, but that "somewhere" isn't "away forever" it's simply "another domain, at worst i2p."

IDK about movies/TV shows being in decline here, it seems to be in better shape now than when I first left the sea 15 years ago. New stuff, especially movies, hits the trackers way faster than they did "back then" and are easily available from public trackers. I can still find all the older things I want, granted some it only on the private trackers I'm using, but it's being kept alive. Old or niche media has always been the hardest to find with torrents, but it really feels easier now than it did when I first started out 25 years ago.

As for books, I rent most of them from my local library as e-books, strip the DRM so I can read on me reader, and immediately return so someone else can rent them. I haven't really needed to pirate a book in years by doing it this way.

I'm not sure how you can look at hundreds of years of IP laws getting btfo by pirates and say the ship is sinking 😂

I'm sorry, but until you can somehow answer the question of "how to make people avoiding laws impossible?" without causing a revolution, there will be laws avoided by people

No laws have ever stopped people from getting what they want. Games will be made by those who hate IP laws and be played by those who seek it. Will that scene be a trillion dollar industry backed by governments and international corporations like the AAA scene is today? Probably not. Will a punk indie scene exist? Of course.

Every popular entertainment medium that has a giant industry will see these same results as well. Movies, books, music, etc. As long as the medium is popular, it will persist outside of IP laws.

Media piracy cannot be stopped. Don’t forget there was media piracy before the internet too. But back then it was physical piracy, and somebody made money on another’s work. That kind of piracy will always be shut down, because it is actually stealing. The fat cats want their money.

But now we have a different kind. More like Robin Hood. Digital piracy takes something and copies it, giving it away for free. The biggest risk for piracy, is that the content holders offer their product at a price so low, it would be horribly inconvenient to pirate it. For example if Apple Music just had you pay a few pennies per song instead of monthly. You’d load up $20 and listen to a lot of music. If TV series offered ad-free streaming for like $0.25 per episode. If movies could be watched for $1. If academic journal articles could be accessed for $1.

But that will never happen. They’ve done the math. They make more money with subscriptions and pricing right at the edge of affordability for many. Why would they want to make less money?

Actually now that I’m thinking about it. The way for them to hurt piracy the most would be to give away low-bitrate copies of everything for free. Stream all the music you want at 96 kbps. Watch every TV series or movie at 480p. Download this ebook as a plain text file. Read this article with tiny thumbnail photos. Free version of game has low-res textures and 720p at 30fps. Even that wouldn’t end piracy, but it would be a lot less popular. It would be harder to find somebody to invest the time bypassing paywalls when you can read the text easily.

Anyway torrent cannot be stopped. It’s moving to onion and i2p, fully decentralized. There will be nobody to take down. Besides that there’s always independent nations who don’t care about digital piracy, who can host private trackers.

Have fun attempting to take down the decentralized torrenting network.

I'd be more worried about media than the ability to pirate it.

Music has adapted to generate plays. Platforms are already being polluted with genAI music.

TV was replaced by streaming services. Series come and go and are very specifically tailored to get people to subscribe. Exclusives are the standard. Single season productions are not uncommon. People are also already investigating ways to pollute this pool with genAI as well.

Movies are a stream of Marvel and Disney garbage that was already more CGI than acting. Now genAI and upscaled classics are on the menu.

Piracy will not go away. People used to record movies with camcorders in the cinema, now they pull raw files from CDN nodes. There is always the scene. The platforms that try to profit from the scene come and go.

Almost all the ways to bypass news paywalls are currently ineffective.

What are you referring to here? Bypass Paywalls Clean is still being updated and covers a lot of stuff across multiple languages.

For music: if (and that's a big if) Spotify does not fuck that up they'll have the majority of people off the harbours.

They deliver exactly what people asked for when it was common to pirate music. A monthly affordable fee, +90% of the music available and no advertising. If neither of these three variables are changing, there will be no big group pirating music anymore.

I don’t like it to be mainstream… I prefer a more underground; learn some shit and get your nerd on type of piracy.

1. Torrents/Usenet
2. Torrents/Usenet .... And so on

Ignoring the rest of your points, I disagree on porn piracy. Not that I would know, being a good Christian ofc ofc, but that scene feels the most alive. If I want to find content from a certain site/person then it is generally a couple of searches away. No private trackers or special software needed. When I compare that to other scenes that require much harder to find websites, applications, etcetera... and it's been that way every time I've checked. I don't think it's going anywhere soon.

20 years ago we also thought piracy was dying. Yet here we are.

Piracy won't be dying any time soon. Every software has its flaws. Sure, pirates will hit a couple rough waves, maybe a storm or two. But piracy will continue.

I think it's mostly supply/demand.

Most people are satisfied with how games are acquired commercially. Steam's DRM system is usually received well. There are outliers using different launchers (sometimes on top of Steam) or games using Denuvo, but most customers are satisfied with how Steam handles it, and it also adds valuable features like cloud saves (so for example when you have a desktop PC and a Steam Deck resuming where you left off is pretty seamless) and Valve didn't have any major fuckups yet (not that I remember anyway). It works, it's convenient and most people can afford it.

Similar thing with music: streaming services work well for the most part and have almost all the music most people would want. They're pretty affordable and convenient.

With movies and TV shows most people were satisfied when Netflix got rolling as it was pretty much the only streaming service you "needed". Nowadays more and more services emerge with their own exclusive content and pricing is increased on a regular basis, sometimes multiple times per year. That's why (from my perspective at least) piracy increases in that sector. It's no longer affordable and no longer convenient.

As for software, I think most people exclusively use free-to-use software anyway. Software from the Adobe suite still gets pirated a lot, I know no one who paid for Adobe software for personal use.

People can run a self hosted search engine/indexer with bitmagnet, how are they going to be taken down?

I feel this way about Anime/Manga piracy, even if it doesn't disappear, Japan and the DMCA will do everything they can to weaken it even more over the years, and the fall of 9anime only makes this nightmare more real every day.