Piracy is here to stay thanks to media companies

Ask yourself this question: “Am I a pirate?” In other words, have you engaged in content piracy recently? If you don’t think so because you haven’t started yet a BitTorrent client or have been visiting a piracy-targeted website for a long time, you may want to reconsider.

Downloading torrents is not the only way to pirate content. Have you ever used someone else’s Netflix account? That is piracy, as you are using content that you would otherwise have to pay for. The person who made their account freely available is also facilitating piracy.

Though it is now abandoned, YouTube Vanced was a way to pirate an experience that would normally cost you money. Popcorn Time, now also gone, was another insanely popular way to stream paid content for free — but also piracy.

In recent years, the lines have blurred between those who pirate and those who don’t. But one thing’s for sure: After a long decline in piracy around the world, consuming unpaid content is on the rise again. This time it might be here to stay.

Also see: The best video streaming services

In the early days of Internet piracy, it was all about sharing MP3 files via services like Napster and Limewire. These services made it much easier to pirate music than to visit a store and buy a physical recording. The practice of illegally obtaining music was rampant on college campuses around this time. In the words of Stephen Witt in his book How music became free:

Music piracy to the late 1990s became what drug experiments were to the late 1960s: a generational transgression of both social norms and existing legislation, with few thoughtful consequences.

Over the years, file sharing has gone beyond music to include TV shows, movies, video games, computer software, books, and more. In 1998, the United States government passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Intended to fight piracy, it gave legal entities the teeth needed to fight digital pirates while preventing content providers from being held liable for copyright infringements by their users.

Unfortunately, this didn’t work properly to avoid the problem. It made it easier to prosecute pirates, but beyond the some high-profile cases, most pirates weren’t afraid of the DMCA. piracy kept rising.

Related reading: The best free music download sites that are legal

Then something interesting happened: Netflix. In 2007, the company began streaming select pieces of video content over the Internet, allowing users to instantly watch movies and TV shows for a single monthly fee. Netflix’s success in this arena has led to multiple other video streaming services, including: Amazon Prime video, huluand more recently Disney Plus and Apple TV Plus.

Similarly, Spotify, Pandora and Deezer gave users access to millions of hours of popular music. Today we also have services such as: Xbox Game Pass Ultimatethat acts as a ‘Netflix of video games’.

In other words, trying to stop pirates with the law didn’t solve the problem. Giving people cheap ways to easily consume content legally did. While piracy never went away, it did start decreasing year on year.

While streaming services helped slow down piracy, they weren’t a panacea. Piracy increases and decreases depending on several factors. For example, an economic downturn usually leads to more piracy simply because people can no longer afford services. Location-blocked content also creates a vacuum in which piracy can spread. After all, if you can’t legally get content because of where you live, you will inevitably find a way around that restriction.

However, the great father of all is the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused a large increase in piracy. With lockdowns around the world locking millions of people in their homes, the ability to consume entertainment became a burning need. Whether it was password sharing, illegal streaming, or even old-fashioned torrenting, people seemed ready to break the law to avoid going crazy. Since 2020, piracy has once again gained a lot of steam.

Of course, content providers have no intention of leaving this unchecked. Two recent anti-piracy changes came from Google and Netflix. Google recently forced the shutdown of the popular piracy tool YouTube Vanced, which offered several features that you would normally get by subscribing to YouTube Premium. Meanwhile, Netflix is ​​testing a monthly costs for users who share their accounts with others. The company hopes this fee will encourage password users to revoke access, encouraging shared users to start their own paid subscriptions.

In these two cases, the measures seem like good ideas. After all, if you didn’t use Vanced for piracy and don’t share your Netflix password, nothing will change for you. Only the pirates have problems, right?

The problem is that these efforts are not benefit users in any way. Keep in mind that piracy deterrents don’t work nearly as well as giving users easy access to reasonably priced content. As long as companies use the carrot instead of the stick approach, piracy should go away on its own.

However, it seems that streaming companies don’t understand that.

In addition to the financial fine against sharing passwords, Netflix recently also increased prices across the board. Of course, the company says these increases are due to the costs involved in creating all of the original content. But there’s no doubt that price increases lead to churn (users dropping subscriptions to rivals) and, in some cases, piracy.

Amazon has also recently increased the price of a Prime membership. The price of Hulu with Live TV went up in 2021, even if it comes with Disney Plus and ESPN Plus now included. Spotify also increased subscription costs in 2021. It seems that most major streaming platforms saw the COVID-19 jump in media consumption as the perfect opportunity to raise prices and make a profit.

Also see: The best TV services for live streaming

Price hikes aren’t the only thing companies have done that could lead users to piracy. Anime streaming platform crunchy rolls recently removed its ad-supported plan for new and ongoing series. Before this change, anyone could watch pretty much any content on Crunchyroll for free if they didn’t mind watching ads. However, now this service only works for shows that are no longer in production.

These changes don’t make streaming services any more attractive than piracy. When you combine them with regional restrictions, streaming device limits, blocked downloads, and other common aspects of streaming subscriptions, you begin to understand why someone could simply find piracy easier.

Not to mention the biggest problem driving users to piracy.

In 2007, Netflix was the only major player for streaming movies and TV. A lot has changed since then. Now there isn’t a media company around that doesn’t offer some kind of subscription-based service.

This makes for an overwhelming situation for most people. For example, someone who likes the TV show The Office has a Peacock subscription to view it. That person would almost certainly also enjoy a show like Ted Lasso, which requires an Apple TV Plus subscription. The Good Place is another show that they would probably love, and it requires a Netflix subscription. That’s three different subscriptions to watch just three very popular shows.

The situation gets even worse when you consider that one of those streaming services may not offer this person much else of interest, meaning they have to pay a subscription fee to watch just one show.

Sports programming is even more complicated. My colleague Rita El Khoury just moved to France and she discovered that she needed to subscribe to five different services to watch every game of her two favorite soccer teams (football for us Americans). That’s just for football. If she wanted to play tennis, basketball, American football or other sports, she needed a few extra subscriptions. It’s madness.

Obviously, every streaming platform hopes its specific content will be strong enough that people won’t mind adding it to the pile. That makes sense if there are three or four players. But today, even if you take away sports platforms, there are no less than a dozen major streaming services — and more to come. Inevitably, what’s going to happen here for a lot of people is they subscribe to a handful of services that offer the most value and then pirate others’ content.

Famously, Gabe Newell — the co-founder and current president of Valve, which runs the Steam gaming platform — had this to say about piracy:

The easiest way to stop piracy is not to put anti-piracy technology to work. It is by giving those people a service that is better than what they get from the pirates.

Today, the world of movie and TV streaming doesn’t deliver what Newell describes.

Originally, streaming services were the rise of cord-cutting, i.e. the termination of a traditional cable subscription to rely solely on internet-based streaming. The reason consumers flocked to streaming was that cable was too expensive and forced them to pay for channels and services they didn’t care about.

Now, instead of being the solution to that problem, streaming services just bring back the same problem. Companies expect people to pay hefty fees each month to access the content they want, even if the rest of the content on the platform is uninteresting to them.

However, unlike traditional cable, it is very easy to use piracy instead of internet streaming. Unless streaming services can give consumers exactly what they want at prices they can afford, piracy will never be the least attractive option. Piracy will stay here.