even in 2007, piracy was a niche thing. your lame cousin probably didn’t download from demonoid or the pirate bay. more people did then than now but it wasn’t substantial.
there was still a reason to pirate even with netflix–there was a ton of content not available on DVD at that time.
at least 10 years ago all the good private torrent sites became severely restricted, some even entirely closing the doors for new members.
not sure where this piracy resurgence is going on, but it’s not on the good sites.
Yeah, Napster was released in 1999 and was huge. Everyone in college in the early 00s was using file sharing networks to download stuff. It wasn’t everyone but it was pretty big.
The real answer is that many people in this thread are personally pirating less because they are old; when you have the money, it’s often just faster and easier to pay, and for games there are some genuine advantages to eg. owning a game on Steam so you can use cloud saves. Most piracy has always been teenagers and college students, since they often can’t buy the stuff they want.
This is the same reason why, in the late 90’s and early 00s, anime piracy in particular was huge - distribution barely existed for most shows and when it did it was wildly overpriced.
I don’t think its fair to say piracy was niche in the early 2000s either though, everyone had napster or limewire/frostwire.
And netflix wasn’t originally streaming only, they started out as online DVD rentals which exploded and then added streaming as a second offering (only discontinuing DVD rentals in 2023).
The modern piracy resurgence is certainly not torrents, though for the power users it is (or usenet), its online streaming sites like whatever the equivalent of 123movies is these days
bad history.
even in 2007, piracy was a niche thing. your lame cousin probably didn’t download from demonoid or the pirate bay. more people did then than now but it wasn’t substantial.
there was still a reason to pirate even with netflix–there was a ton of content not available on DVD at that time.
at least 10 years ago all the good private torrent sites became severely restricted, some even entirely closing the doors for new members.
not sure where this piracy resurgence is going on, but it’s not on the good sites.
Yeah, Napster was released in 1999 and was huge. Everyone in college in the early 00s was using file sharing networks to download stuff. It wasn’t everyone but it was pretty big.
The real answer is that many people in this thread are personally pirating less because they are old; when you have the money, it’s often just faster and easier to pay, and for games there are some genuine advantages to eg. owning a game on Steam so you can use cloud saves. Most piracy has always been teenagers and college students, since they often can’t buy the stuff they want.
This is the same reason why, in the late 90’s and early 00s, anime piracy in particular was huge - distribution barely existed for most shows and when it did it was wildly overpriced.
I don’t think its fair to say piracy was niche in the early 2000s either though, everyone had napster or limewire/frostwire.
And netflix wasn’t originally streaming only, they started out as online DVD rentals which exploded and then added streaming as a second offering (only discontinuing DVD rentals in 2023).
The modern piracy resurgence is certainly not torrents, though for the power users it is (or usenet), its online streaming sites like whatever the equivalent of 123movies is these days