No it also means it's a service problem in the sense that it's not priced right for a geography. Pricing a game $70 where local average monthly income is $120 a month is a service problem. If you expect people from that geographic region to pay, the product should be priced within their means. And thus argument is valid only for digital goods where every new copy of the said goods costs mere few cents.

Lets compare three options as example:

One streaming service with everything:

• monetary costs: 25 €/month
• opportunity cost: login, type name in search bar, enjoy in good quality, language and subtitles of choice

Piracy:

• monetary costs: 0-5 €/month (hardware/vpn)
• opportunity costs: keep up to date with existing aggregator sites, take protective measures against identification, be wary of malware, limited scope of languages and subtitles, varying quality

Current streaming services:

• monetary costs: 100 €/month or more, if you cover most services
• opportunity cost: login to each service, look if they have the particular series/movie, be limited by region to which languages and subtitles you can use, have only certain episodes or certain seasons of a series, get a movie as a result, but actually have to pay extra for lending it...

People choose whether to pay monetary or opportunity costs. For a broke student priacy might still be the way to go, because they have time but not money. For most people a convenient streaming service will be the way to go though, because not having to worry about everything around and just finding your movie/series in 30 seconds, after you put dinner in the plates is the preferred option.

The current situation combines high monetary costs with high opportunity costs, so that piracy becomes attractive to many people, who would be happy to pay for a streaming service, that actually covers everything.

So i think "almost always" is perfectly applicable. Also keep in mind, that the offer of pirated stuff is directly related to the demand. if the demand reduces, so will the offer, which in this case would make piracy even less convenient. Of course the pricing matters, and if the one streaming service would cost say 50 €/month, more people would pirate again. But the dominant factor first is the service quality.

Actually not very true in regards to gaming at least, a study found a decently wide majority of game pirates end up buying the game. Alot of em just either use it as a demo or to bypass the copy protection garbage that fucks up the game they want to pay for.

If that's true on its face, then you're not losing any money either way since they are never going to pay regardless even if you try to force them to.

Meanwhile, you can absolutely scare away what could have been a paying customer by offering dogshit service.

No it also means it’s a service problem in the sense that it’s not priced right for a geography. Pricing a game $70 where local average monthly income is $120 a month is a service problem. If you expect people from that geographic region to pay, the product should be priced within their means. And thus argument is valid only for digital goods where every new copy of the said goods costs mere few cents.

People who pirate because they don't want to pay will never, ever pay. Not worth considering them to be honest.

The best public option is Proton imo. With paid subscriptions you even get access to Secure Core servers where Proton runs their own data centers instead of hiring 3rd-parties like NordVPN, etc.

Case-point: Nord has been hacked before bc of third-party data centers. Proton has no breaches so far and does regular security audits, has plenty of servers outside the 14 Eyes Alliance, and actively fund privacy focused projects.

Mullvad is a close second bc of their anonymous payments.

It really depends on the quantity and sensitivity of the content I'd say.

But Proton has replaced everything I used Google for (Drive/Email). Proton will work for a good 90% of everyone most likely.

I dont have much to compare it to.