How Disney and Warner Bros. Are Causing Internet Piracy to Boom | Platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ were supposed to do away with pirated media. Instead, they may make them stronger than ever.::Platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ were supposed to do away with pirated media. Instead, they may make them stronger than ever.
“Stronger than ever”… I still feel like the golden age of piracy is long lost
Ship based piracy absolutely.
Digital piracy:
I remember Kazaa and LimeWire where you hoped the thing you were downloading for hours/days wasn’t a virus or a joke meme making fun of you for trusting someone. Getting an entire album of mp3s that were actually the band you hoped for and not missing any songs was a minor miracle.
Now there are dozens of automated tools that talk to each other. I type the name of the movie into a search bar, look through a list of posters and click the ‘request’ button. It get’s torrented in the background and then shows up on my Plex server. If I paid for a usenet group all that could happen an order of magnitude faster.
Search in one place, watch in one place.
It’s not quite as instant as streaming, but at this point I have such a back catalogue to work through that that isn’t really an issue.
You ain’t kidding! I recently got Sonarr/Radar/Prowlarr/Overseer setup and oh my gosh is it glorious! Look through trending movies/shows, couple clicks and it’s in Jellyfin in minutes. The industry is going to have to produce something VERY consumer-focused/friendly to even begin to tempt me away from this. They done fucked up. 😂
I downloaded Matilda the other day. Yes the movie about a child that’s brilliant and might have super powers and the premise of the entire movie is basically Ha ha child abuse. It’s a movie I had not thought about in decades and on a whim wanted to watch for nostalgia. I checked all the streaming services I have. None of them had it. I checked TPB. I had it in 1080p in five minutes.
This is not an unusual story. I mean the Matilda part but I feel like this is the exact same story for nearly everyone pirating things more frequently.
Care to elaborate?
Maybe this is just a regional thing, but 10 to 20 years ago piracy was everywhere and it was pretty accessible. You could download anything from common social media and forum links with out caring a lot about security. Games, books, music, programs. There where torrent clients dedicated entirely for music and videos, video players for pirated movies filmed by a freaking hero sliding a camera and a tripod to a local cinema and translated by another hero. You got sites to host shit without any restriction and anyone with a hand and a computer could access it. Just click and go.
One of those hosting sites, megaupload, the mecca of piracy got a few lawsuits because of that and the owner ended up taking the site down. That was a dark day and after that hosting sites started falling one by one. Torrents become increasingly popular. There were tons of them, commented and maintain, leaving messages for the christian behind you was a thing. ‘Seed please, seeeeeed!’ And shit. This isnt something that happened in my country, but as I understand, arround that time groups of lawyers tarted monitoring internet to catch people pirating things and vpns polulated everywhere. At one point some torrent sites started being raided (tpb, now accessed through a proxy) or just closed
Both abundancy and easyness to access pirated things have become increasingly difficult over the years… there are still places to go. In spanish, book repositories close from time to time now they have move everything to lib-gen. Standards? You could download them from TPB long time ago. Last time i had to dive in VK to get them, now i dont know what to do if I lose them.
Some things i say could be wrong*
Edit: another jewl from the golden age, i remember downloading MW3 a day before it got launched. Some dudes (teknogods) used a loop in the user agreement to make some sort of a server client, and of course there was no restriction for pirated versions. It was even better than buying the game. I live in sudamerica and always played with 300 ping (MW, cod 4) with teknogods it was closer to 30.
Thanks for the detailed explanation. I guess I’ve gotten so use to today’s pirating techniques that my perception of what is considered easy has changed. Reading through your post, I’m reminded of how much easier it really was back then.