When people think of piracy, they often picture pirates on the high seas in the 17th and 18th centuries. While that form of piracy still exists today, it’s far less common. The type of piracy I’m talking about is internet piracy, which involves illegally downloading or sharing copyrighted content. A good example of internet piracy is downloading a movie from the internet. This can carry serious legal consequences, including up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000 for downloading just one movie.
History of Intnet Piracy
Internet piracy began in the 1980s and 1990s with bulletin boards, where people would share recordings of media and upload them for others to download. In the early 2000s, music piracy exploded in popularity with services like Napster and Limewire. However, by the late 2000s and early 2010s, piracy started to decline, thanks to services like Apple Music and Spotify, which made accessing music more convenient and affordable than piracy. But in the late 2010s, movie and TV piracy surged again.
Reason for Piracy
Let’s address this upfront: there will always be people who pirate because it’s free. That’s a given, and it’s hard to completely stop. However, many people pirate because it’s more convenient. With so many streaming services—Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, and others—people can end up paying $120 or more per month to access all the content they want. In some areas, cable costs $80 to $100 a month. Given the high costs, it’s tempting to pirate and get content for free.
Another major reason people pirate is because they don’t actually own the media they pay for. If you’re watching a show on Netflix and it gets removed from the platform, you may have to subscribe to another streaming service to continue watching it. This can get expensive. Additionally, even if you pay for a 4K subscription, sometimes you’re only getting 1080p quality, which feels like a ripoff.
Some people suggest using official apps or smart TVs, but what if you don’t want to download proprietary software just to watch a show? Even buying digital versions on platforms like Amazon isn’t a guarantee—you don’t truly own the media. If Amazon loses the licensing rights, the media could be removed from your account with no refund, no physical copy, and no way to watch it. This happened with the book 1984 when Amazon remotely deleted it from Kindle devices.
What can you do
If you choose to pirate, there are different methods. (I don’t recommend this, of course!) But if you were to do it, there are sites like site. (which you definitely should not visit) that provide access to a wide variety of content. Another option is self-hosting: with a few hard drives and maybe a GPU, you could set up services like Radarr, Soanrr, Lidarr, and ReadarrJust make sure to use a VPN so your ISP doesn’t take action against you. With this setup, you could have your own personal Netflix-like server.
If you do pirate, it’s important to support creators by buying physical media or merchandise whenever possible.
How to stop piracy
While you can’t fully stop piracy, there are ways to make it less common. The solution is simple: make media affordable. Music piracy is practically nonexistent today because for just $10 a month, you can access 99% of the music you want. And if it’s not available, you can always rip the CD and add it to your personal collection on Spotify. The same principle applies to games—buying them from Steam is usually more convenient than pirating.
With movies and TV shows, however, you might need to spend $120 a month just to access 60% of what you want to watch. That’s a ripoff. In the early days of streaming, you could subscribe to three services—Netflix, Prime Video, and Hulu—and get around 70% of the content you wanted for about $30 a month. Gabe Newell, the creator of Steam, once said, “Piracy is almost always a service problem, not a pricing problem,” and he was completely right. Just compare the success of music streaming to the fragmented mess of TV and movie streaming.