There is so much good, open source software that I haven't had to pirate any software in years.
As far as movies and TV, the piracy won't stop until the enshittification stops. Usenet and torrents won't go anywhere.
This is so true regarding software. The FOSS apps present today are good enough with adequate features for daily day users like me - whether on Linux, Windows & especially Android (almost all my apps there are FOSS). I simply haven’t had the need to pirate software for a decade now.
Now games and media, that’s a whole different story. Coming from a third world country, I simply can’t fuel my gaming desires with a weak currency that even great services like steam hardly makes a difference. Therefore - sailing the high seas.
Open source software offers significant benefits, but there are still many positions that remain unfilled. Specifically, it falls short in areas such as professional software (like AutoCAD) and business management software (such as QuickBooks Desktop and ERP systems).
There's a difference here that I describe as "pro" meaning specialized, complex software targeted at big businesses vs individual tools of the trade: Vectorworks is gonna get paid for happily by companies needing support and relying on it for critical output, while your next door young architect will run an outdated, cracked version of AutoCAD because it's just too expensive - that kid could (and should) run Qcad.
Where I see pirated software surviving is also as a form of legacy support: if you run old hardware (i.e. 32bits), that's where "pro" software is gonna suck & leave you dry, while torrents are still out there.
In gaming or media, cracking looks like a sport, I feel people just want to have fun blowing restrictions to pieces. It's heartwarming!
Back to the 'tools of the trade" category, I am happy to pay a moderate price to support a talented dev (Isadora, D::Light) but get understandably annoyed at huge businesses practicing insufferable licensing schemes. I wish people start looking, and using then supporting more alternatives out there - but isn't photoshop still crack-able because it helps it dominate the market where The Gimp would do if it was the standard?
Torrenting on I2P especially won’t go anywhere. Even if you ban all VPNs/their legal protections
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.
Porn piracy is absolutely huge. I think you're just doing a bad job downloading it.
Unless you have a very particular kink or fetish, porn is the one thing that you can find for free all over the internet. You don't even have to look that hard.
Piracy of movies, TV, music, & books is alive and well with no intention of slowing down. If anything, the advent of streaming helped get media in higher quality sooner than before. It's even easier if you're willing to pay a little for a private tracker membership, of a Newsgroups subscription.
Gaming is the most difficult part because cracking copy protections carry a very high risk of infecting your computer with a nasty virus. Even then, if you know where to look, there are trusted groups that value their reputation and pride themselves on releasing clean repacks.
Bottom line is, there's not going to be a "post-piracy world" OP asks about. The game simply changed to paying for a single all-in-one subscription instead of being nickel-and-dimed to death by corporations. And it's already here.
I really like your way of thinking. Have a good one.
Honestly my friends ask me tonnes of questions like this, including "what happens when AI takes over", or "when everything mines your data".
I don't think people realise how close me as an IT person is to going and living in an off grid cabin in the woods.
Your friends will find you wherever you are and will continue asking you such questions. There is no escape.
honestly not trying to be a shill but there was a brief period that caught a glimpse of a post-piracy world where there were very little streaming services that had all the content you could want. It moved me away from piracy because of the convenience, library, and being able to share with friends and family.
Ideally a post-piracy world would have the options for uncensored/original versions of content, the ability to buy and store said content locally and own in perpetuity, with a price point for access to a vast library from a very small number of services. As many have said, the way to combat "piracy" is to offer a service better than piracy itself.
If video streaming worked the way music streaming does, that would be a major blow to piracy for sure.
If I had to have Spotify, Deezer, Tidal, and Apple Music in order to listen to everything I want to listen to, I would subscribe to none of them and pirate all my music. Fortunately, most of these services have the same core catalog, the major difference between them is UX and extra features. You just choose the one you like and you're set.
No such luck with video streaming services which have nearly no overlap.
I think your examples apply only to a specific use case. In particular, for movies and TV shows — illegal streaming sites only account for one part of pirated material. I would assume many more simply download film/TV.
Can't speak to the others but I'm fairly sure that pirates will find a way to pirate no matter the obstacles.
FOSS alternatives are out there for most software. I don't really care for pirating photoshop when GIMP is free.
You can't really kill P2P file sharing. If there is a need for creating a seed then someone will do it if the film/show is popular enough. Will probably be hosted through a DMCA non-compliant country.
Actually, many old movies and shows are available on P2P networks, but the lack of seeders renders them inaccessible.
It depends on the movie, but I agree people do need to keep seeding more for those older, niche films.
Even if there was a multinational effort to stop P2P file sharing I feel like other methods would just be adopted or become mainstream
Even then I still don't think you could stop it. Maybe put a dent in it by taking down sites that host them, but all that'll do really is push indexers onto .onion or i2p, or make it so you share the torrent files by word of mouth or matrix/telegram groups, or back to IRC.
A very good point. I had forgotten about I2P and I don't know a ton about how hosting an onion site works
Can't wait for the highly dystopic future where we transfer files via smoke signals
It'll happen some day. There will eventually be "Illegal" wireless transmitting devices that do things such as transmit data over disallowed frequencies, break the token rate speed limit imposed by the fcc (fuck 56k) and illegally use encryption (using data encryption on amateur radio is illegal). When they do start becoming a thing, they'll be able to transmit data maybe a few miles at up to a megabyte per second (not 1 megabit), or for dozens of miles at a few kilobytes per second. Depending on whether the designers wanted to prioritize speed or distance.
The technology exists to make such wireless transceivers using off the shelf parts available to normal people, there's just no reason for them to exist. Yet.
I think 1) and 2) have already been that way for at least 15 years. Software copy protection used to be very simplistic and is getting improved constantly. Also when I grew up games didn't yet talk to servers and they do it for quite some time already. Every new physical video format gets a new copy protection mechanism... DVD, BluRay,... now streaming services with DRM... Illegal sites get shut down all the time.
The piracy scene also adapts, changes their methology. I'm pretty sure it'll continue that way. I asked the same question 10 years ago and yet here we are.
The adult content is getting worse though. But i think mainly for the big and well known commercial streaming sites. Maybe there are still torrents of that around and pirating adult content will get similar to pirating a tv series.
As somebody who only got back into this recently (thanks Amazon, you sticking ads into Prime gave me the push I needed), it involves a lot of subscriptions and unavailable content.
To me, the term "post-piracy" means that piracy has taken over and is the norm; not that it's been abolished. "After piracy has taken over..." I suspect wearing parrots on your shoulder would be much more in vogue.
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?
No, I don't think it will go like that.
But if piracy would go away, then it would mean we live in a great world:
As long as those points are not achieved, there will always be a need for piracy, and people will always find new ways to get their content. So far, I do not see us being somewhere even close to that ideal world, so there are plenty of reasons for piracy to exist.
I personally try to pirate things more ethically, for example I try to buy music and games whenever I can, but I know several people that pirate stuff just because they can.
Hahahaha
Dumb.
And Dumber
*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.
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
I've also felt that the age of piracy is coming to an end and subsequently have begun hoarding a lifetime worth of content. I have 32 TB to fill and I'm halfway there. My taste is mostly older movies and shows, so I want to ensure that I have access to them forever.
I've struggled to find resources for adult content, though, so that's a point of concern. I'm open to suggestions.
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.
Post-piracy? There will only be darkweb piracy that untraceable and unkillable. Everything will be available anonymously through I2P and there will be a jump in its popularity. Every normie will know that in order to download the new blockbuster, all they have to do is install I2P, an eDonkey clone, QBittorent, or Popcorn Time (which will run on I2P's anonymous torrents).
I pray that they shut down every single clearweb streaming and download website for us to finally all move to the darkweb.
Anti Commercial AI thingy
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
[??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 wonderfully deviated this conversation towards the real threats we are facing in the near future, and right now. That was very well said, thank you.
"You'll own nothing and be happy"
as software becomes more complicated and harder to modify the tools we use to pirate will catch up eventually
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