The more I think about it the more I believe that we are reaching the end of mainstream piracy in short amount of time:

Paid Research Papers

This type of piracy suffered it’s downfall with the downfall of Sci-hub and it’s looking like it will never recover. But I don’t feel that this is a loss as there is a lot of open access journals and after hearing about MIT decision to stop using Elsevier, I hope that most universities will support the open access journals and leave the paid ones.

Games

Needless to say that it’s getting harder for pirated games crackers to bypass DRM and I expect it to to get worse in the following years and I also expect a lot of game studios to release their games under freemium model with a lot of DLCs and micro transactions.

In general currently there is a good amount of games which did not get pirated yet.

Movies

I am kind of optimistic about the distribution and hope that more pirated movies distributors (Websites, Social media pages/groups/channels, …Etc) will come up, but in my opinion I think that most services will be shut down within 5-8 years, but old movies will be forgotten, so if you looked for a movie from more than one year old you will not find it, hopefully the torrent piracy community stays alive.

I think new services like Tubi might begin to improve in quality and quantity to fulfill the needs of the people who don’t want to pay for streaming.

Music

I kind of think that this is the only type of piracy that will kind of exist till the end of times.

Books

I am scared that it will end/become hard to find within 2 years, I hope I am wrong, but I am very pessimistic about this due to the lawsuits involving libgen, Anna Archive and even internet archive.

Applications

Currently the applications that are worth pirating are few and are usually worth thousands of dollars.

With the exception of Accounting/ERP software, I think that most companies fight piracy softly without really killing it because it’s basically a free marketing to their software.

Android Apps

I think it will go on for 1-3 years and then it will slowly die as companies are making it harder to mod their apps and Google is slowly making it harder on some apps to be modded (as per some of the Android apps modders).

News articles

Almost all the ways to bypass news paywalls are currently ineffective.

Most news sources currently are free to read, so the downfall of piracy of news articles is a good thing in my opinion as it was really free marketing for the paywalled news articles, I think people need to start ignoring paid news websites and to instead to donate to non-profit news sources.

Porn

I think that it will have a mediocre 2-4 years before all the websites turn into pornhub clones, especially with what is happening with goodporn, that will scare all the other websites into compliance to not lose their sites and especially since the number of websites which is holding the porn piracy scene is relatively small.

I think we are truly are experiencing the ultimate downfall of piracy.

Quick Note: before anyone say that Torrent cannot be stopped, that is correct but sadly the torrents search engines/indexes can be taken down. So even torrent is not immune.

    • ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      edit-2
      2 months ago

      Removing DRM from a legally obtained copy is not illegal in itself.

      It is technically not illegal to remove the DRM, if the purpose is just to read it and the DRM is not compatible with my reading device. I just still have to honour the lending agreement I made with my local library.