I believe we’re approaching the final 3-5 years of prevalent piracy for several reasons:
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Software: The difficulty of cracking and modifying software has significantly increased.
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Movies and TV Shows: Numerous streaming sites have been shut down or faced legal penalties.
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Adult Content: New releases are often removed within 1-5 weeks, and many older titles are no longer available on piracy platforms.
Given these trends, what might a post-piracy world entail?
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There has never been a better time to use free open source software. Software piracy is actually less convenient today. Game piracy is really only dead for big multiplayer games, which makes sense since they rely on online services.
Pirate streaming sites were a stupid thing to begin with. I’m happy to see them and the malware they push die. Torrents and P2P will always be king.
Porn piracy is absolutely huge. I think you’re just doing a bad job downloading it.
A post piracy world can only be one thing: crushing authoritarianism. That’s the only way piracy dies.
Game piracy is currently in a precarious position, given how difficult it’s become to crack denuvo. Games without denuvo still release very often, but especially in the AAA space, piracy is definitely slowing down
*Software: Idk, never really messed with pirating software, that’s how you become part of someone’s botnet.
*Movies and TV shows: Torrents and Usenet.
*Adult Content: Torrents and Usenet.
*Music: Slsk and yt-dlp.
The problem is not their absence from the P2P networks; rather, it’s the lack of seeders that renders them useless.
He’s right, usenet isn’t p2p, but finding old movies there can be a challenge. Still, I manage just fine for old movies with ipt and tl for the most part, or the rare thing I can only find on soulseek of all places. Archive actually has a bunch too.
Usenet isn’t P2P
Piracy will never die, the one next step the industry goes the two next steps piracy goes. So basically this is a thing of cats and mice, it will never stop, it just goes and goes…
There is no post-piracy world, while the private owned system remains there will be people pirating it.
If private owned economic system never ends ergo piracy never ends also.
Private owned system should end? Idk maybe yes maybe not, we should define what’s the point into ending it or not? If the system still maintain the pyramid scheme going what’s the point of getting rid of it?
Did you read my post?
If you have read my post, you will understand the conclusion that I have reached.
If you wish to validate your own conclusion, you need to address the issues raised here.
Hahahaha
Given these trends, what might a post-piracy world entail?
Assuming you are right with this:
For media: Buy in or consume less. If piracy will really become less prevalent you don’t really have much choice, do you? I don’t think everyone has to live like I do, but my media consumption in the past few years has shrunk more and more (for various reasons) and maybe that’s something other people may gravitate towards as well. Life has a lot to offer beyond screens.
For software it’s trickier. Maybe you find an open source project that suits your needs or maybe there’s a competitor that hasn’t (yet) enshittified their product. Unfortunately, if you really need a specific piece of software I think you might just be SOL 🤷♂️
Just my two cents
Lifa has a lot to offer beyond screens
Yarr, mateys, all sails to the Public Library! We’ll drop anchor at the secondhand bookshop on our way back! And drop all that electronic ballast, it’s only slowing us down…
You are absolutely right; I hadn’t thought of it this way but a post-piracy world should be a frugal one, could be a quiet one. A planet-friendly one.
[??Uh, you’re getting downvoted for asking a straight question? WTF lemmies??]
OP’s question is “given the above arbitrary and largely unfounded claims, how would a post-piracy world look?” which is… not straight. It’s not just based on anecdotal premises, it also demands answers that don’t call those into question.
OP’s premises may be not wrong on the first point, is in need of some realignment on the second, and I have no idea about the third.
The idea of a post-piracy world can still be envisioned and discussed; will it be full of FOSS and CC-BY-SA? Will it leaves us with only secondhand pulp comics while our roku devices blast 23h out of 24 of ads? Who knows?
Sure. But I’d drop the premises for that discussion. A post-privacy world is probably where convenience trumps everything. Everything is commercialized even more. Access to the internet isn’t free any more, options like selfhosting or uploading things are heavily restricted and each and every service requires you to show your ID card into the webcam and give them your phone number. All private is being sold and AI shows you ADs and propaganda like in the old scifi movies.
I mean we’re already half-way there. And I think it’s especially bad that all the people use closed services that require me to dox myself and give them my phone number if I want to participate. It’s just that we still have alternatives. It now needs politics to cut down access to the internet so only the big companies can host platforms and then force them to stop piracy. And cut the free flow of information and connections to other countries with other legislation. Reasons could be to protect intellectual property, stop crime (also like in the old dystopian movies) or “would somebody please think of the children”… These attempts to take away freedom happen regularly in politics. I think a post-privacy world would simultaneously be one without freedom. Either a scifi dystopia, a Cory Doctorow novel or like in the countries where they currently filter the internet successfully, which aren’t democratic countries.
I think I’m far more concerned with the loss of any privacy or freedom in such scenarios. Not being able to pirate things would be a minor inconvenience in such hypothetical worlds.
I strongly doubt that it’ll happen out of the reasons OP gave. They’re all technical in nature. And in the past we were always able to circumvent the technical ones. Countermeasures have also improved. I don’t see a reason why it’s different now. But I think society could change and affect this. And there are anti-democratic things happening currently…
“You’ll own nothing and be happy”
More brazen crackdown of piracy, DNS-level or maybe even IP-level blocking. Complete overhaul of the infrastructure of the internet to make it more “corporate friendly.”
We got to remember that piracy, whose backbone is the bittorrent peer-to-peer network, exists because the current infrastructure of the internet allows users to open their ports and allow people from all over the world to request media from them. The internet infrastructure is controlled by the government, who is controlled by corporate overlords. As of right now, the government has (imperfectly) worked hard to retain the neutrality of the internet, but we might be losing this battle folks.
I’ve always advocated for i2p (https://geti2p.net/en/) because it allows us to be more resilient to the current infrastructure, with the added bonus of not needing a VPN to download stuff. It would be lovely to see you all at tracker2.postman.i2p :-) Yeah, speed might be an issue but it’ll get better once there are faster nodes in the network. I2p allows people to participate in the network even when behind a CGNAT and unable to forward their ports, as is the case with a lot of restrictive ISPs.
More detailed tech information to be found : https://geti2p.net/en/docs/how/tech-intro
I2p is too slow to be useful.
