The more I think about it the more I believe that we are reaching the end of mainstream piracy in short amount of time:
Paid Research Papers
This type of piracy suffered it’s downfall with the downfall of Sci-hub and it’s looking like it will never recover. But I don’t feel that this is a loss as there is a lot of open access journals and after hearing about MIT decision to stop using Elsevier, I hope that most universities will support the open access journals and leave the paid ones.
Games
Needless to say that it’s getting harder for pirated games crackers to bypass DRM and I expect it to to get worse in the following years and I also expect a lot of game studios to release their games under freemium model with a lot of DLCs and micro transactions.
In general currently there is a good amount of games which did not get pirated yet.
Movies
I am kind of optimistic about the distribution and hope that more pirated movies distributors (Websites, Social media pages/groups/channels, …Etc) will come up, but in my opinion I think that most services will be shut down within 5-8 years, but old movies will be forgotten, so if you looked for a movie from more than one year old you will not find it, hopefully the torrent piracy community stays alive.
I think new services like Tubi might begin to improve in quality and quantity to fulfill the needs of the people who don’t want to pay for streaming.
Music
I kind of think that this is the only type of piracy that will kind of exist till the end of times.
Books
I am scared that it will end/become hard to find within 2 years, I hope I am wrong, but I am very pessimistic about this due to the lawsuits involving libgen, Anna Archive and even internet archive.
Applications
Currently the applications that are worth pirating are few and are usually worth thousands of dollars.
With the exception of Accounting/ERP software, I think that most companies fight piracy softly without really killing it because it’s basically a free marketing to their software.
Android Apps
I think it will go on for 1-3 years and then it will slowly die as companies are making it harder to mod their apps and Google is slowly making it harder on some apps to be modded (as per some of the Android apps modders).
News articles
Almost all the ways to bypass news paywalls are currently ineffective.
Most news sources currently are free to read, so the downfall of piracy of news articles is a good thing in my opinion as it was really free marketing for the paywalled news articles, I think people need to start ignoring paid news websites and to instead to donate to non-profit news sources.
Porn
I think that it will have a mediocre 2-4 years before all the websites turn into pornhub clones, especially with what is happening with goodporn, that will scare all the other websites into compliance to not lose their sites and especially since the number of websites which is holding the porn piracy scene is relatively small.
I think we are truly are experiencing the ultimate downfall of piracy.
Quick Note: before anyone say that Torrent cannot be stopped, that is correct but sadly the torrents search engines/indexes can be taken down. So even torrent is not immune.
Piracy will end when copyright ends.
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’m afraid to tell you that your e-book deDRMing is very much considered piracy. 😅
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?
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.
The downfall of movie, TV and music piracy was cheap streaming. The downfall of cheap streaming brought piracy back.
This is your brain on torrentfreak.
Oddly pessimistic. From what ive seen, piracy has increased thanks to subscription services
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.”
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
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.
