A consequence of the centralization of the web into fewer and fewer providers and monopolies is that talks of piracy dwindled on the internet over the years. Then with the streaming boom of the mid-2010s it was completely dead.

Now piracy has become a dirty word that people fear to utter. You can be banned on social media for talking about it, and most people just avoid the topic entirely. It’s like jaywalking (you probably know the history but it was a ‘crime’ started by auto manufacturers to claim the streets back from pedestrians).

Talks of “it’s on the pirate bay” have been replaced with ‘it’s on netflix. it’s on hulu with ads. it’s on amazon prime and they have a deal right now.’

And yes, this was really things people said. They would readily tell you to go look for it on thepiratebay, you had entire websites that hosted episodes of your favorite shows for streaming. I remember watching the simpsons on wtso, literally watch-the-simpsons-online. It wasn’t just the circles I was in back in the day, people really talked more openly about piracy. Even when as far back as the early 2000s there were attempts already by the RIAA to equate piracy with violent crime.

People use debrid services they pay for just to watch shows when you can still torrent things as easily as before. They rationalize it as being cheaper than paying for streaming services - but I pay 0$ for stremio+torrentio addon. Maybe debrid services have their extra uses but they just seem like kind of a luxury from the way people talk about them. And yes torrenting works perfectly fine on a VPN.

Even wilder (but not unexpected) there are people who tie their self-worth to paying for streaming services. Apparently you’re ‘poor’ if you don’t pay 20$ a month for netflix. Even in the era of DVDs we already knew it was ludicrous to ask someone to pay 20$ for a DVD. IP gatekeeps media from people, it doesn’t allow it to be made.

The message is clear: if you don’t have money, you don’t deserve to experience culture.

The economic arguments had been thoroughly discussed and concluded back in the 2000s already; studies showed that people who pirate are not likely to buy the content so there was no ‘lost sale’. Piracy also makes a copy, it doesn’t remove the original, so it’s not the same as stealing.

For a while this gained traction, and then monopolies emerged and completely shut down any talk of piracy in the public sphere.

There’s a talk of convenience, that it’s more convenient to open up netflix or steam and buy the game or movie there. But is it? You have to login, provide payment info, etc. At its hardest pirating a game consisted of downloading the torrent, installing, running keygen, and then going on cdfreeworld or whatever it was called to download the no-cd fix. Today it’s even easier, most games come in a portable format.

And yet it’s never been easier to pirate things. Books, games, shows, are still just as accessible as they’ve ever been, maybe even more. Used to be emulating a nintendo DS at the time it was in production was out of reach of most people on their home computer, and you had to buy a super expensive microSD card that had maybe 256MB of space on it to run an R4 in your DS. Today, you can easily emulate the nintendo switch on a home machine. You can root your 3DS super easily by just following a guide, and even download games directly from an app on it (but I found it to be very slow bc of the wifi protocol the 3ds uses).

Not only that but piracy preserves material. All those IPs that holders just sit on and do nothing with because they might have a profitable idea for it down the line. All those books that don’t get reprints that can still be read, and those games that can still be played when you can’t find them in stores any longer.

Not only that but it creates fans who will go on to purchase media. It keeps licenses alive, so there’s benefits to the capitalist corporations too. They just want to pretend it’s a solved problem because they fear it hurting their bottom line. A lot of artists got discovered in the music industry by being widely pirated, which got them a record deal.

You also own your media this way; it’s on your hard-drive. I remember when Steam became a giant in the video game selling business, people were worried about how you didn’t really own the games. Steam can ban your account at any time and you’d lose everything you’ve ever bought from them. You have no recourse.

Emulators also help preserve games. Nintendo’s own NES emulators aren’t great, they fail at a lot of tasks. This is “just” the NES so they’re pretty basic games, but this failure on tests means that emulation is not 1:1 accurate as if on a real machine and can start behaving strangely. Open-source emulators are better than the ‘official’ ones from the IP holders.

Even on here we self-censor about piracy and other topics so as not to draw attention to the lemmyverse. It’s become a ubiquitous dirty word and in good company one must pretend not to know what piracy even is, because corporations demand it.