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.
Oddly pessimistic. From what ive seen, piracy has increased thanks to subscription services
I do notice the quality of p2p was diminished over the past decade, probably less people are keeping their share ratio up. But that has been getting better lately. Though it is true that it’s virtually impossible to get older movies through p2p, but that has always been more or less the case.
It did not. I think you and OP are feeling this based on anecdotal/singular experience. I can get any old movie I want and am able to download all the latest stuff very quickly using two private trackers. Been on one of them for over a decade and the other one is TL and I hardly ever use TL. 90/10 ratio.
That might very well be true, maybe I’ve grown complacent since setting up my arr suite a couple years back. Tonight I’ll try manually searching for the older files that have been gathering cobwebs in my search que and see if that helps.
Many of the good private trackers have very active request sections too. Really obscure or old stuff may not be readily available, but with a decent bounty (if required) someone will probably be able to find them for you.
I’ve been hearing pessimism like this for over 20 years and yet all I can see is that piracy is always increasing and becoming even more accessible
The neverending cat and mouse game of piracy
That is not even remotely true comment. Piracy was really big in the early 2000’s lat 1990’s and it has not come back to that state since then.
The downfall of movie, TV and music piracy was cheap streaming. The downfall of cheap streaming brought piracy back.
Piracy is easier than ever IMO. 20 years ago it was messy, and full of viruses and fake content. Nowadays there’s plug&play pirate services with refined content.
There’s so much people in the world today convinced that their subscriptions are worth it that I think they’ll let pirates coexist in peace, because they know pirates wouldn’t pay for it anyways.
I’ve been pirating content since floppy disks. I’ve watched all the changes happen in that time. Pirating is more accessible than ever.
Piracy will end when copyright ends.
Lol, torrents aren’t going anywhere. Decentralized and entrenched as fuck.
No; Piracy won’t stop.
Analog loopholes still exist; and cannot be eliminated completely from the chain. Enterprising crackers will tinker and find weaknesses in systems. People will find bypasses, workarounds, and straight up just crack whole encryption schemes that were badly implemented.
Encryption was never intended to protect content. It was intended to protect people. In the short term; sure, DRM and encryption can protect profits. In the long term, it provably cannot and does not. Oftentimes it gets cracked or goes offline; and the costs associated with keeping authentication servers up for long enough to keep lawsuits off your back is provably large and difficult to scale. I would even assert that it costs more to run DRM than it saves anyone in ‘missed profits’.
Frequently companies also argue that it saves profits by recapturing “lost sales”; but that’s provably false. A consumer, deprived of any other viable choice, will in fact, just not buy the thing if they cannot buy it for what they deem as a fair price. It has also been proven; that if they can acquire the content freely; they will oftentimes become far more willing to buy whatever they acquired or even buy future titles. When a customer trusts; they may decide to purchase. But why should a customer trust a company that does not trust them?
This is your brain on torrentfreak.
Keep sharing the tapes.
Paid research papers - Maybe, and that’d be kinda nice if it happened.
Games - Nah that’ll continue on as it has, some get cracked and some don’t, it is what it is.
Movies - No way. Torrents and Usenet have been here for how long now? They’ll be around for longer than any other methods. Frankly this applies to everything, but especially movies.
Music - Ironically the only form of piracy I almost did watch die. Nobody was doing it really for a few years there because spotify was “just so convenient” but then they thankfully shit the bed and now it’s back in a BIG way.
Books - It’ll be another game of whack-a-mole. Those three go down more will pop up (though I hope those three just stay up!) There’s also IRC to pirate books from, too, and those have been running for like 30yr.
Applications - This is dangerous as hell, you guys have fun I guess. Imma be over here using FOSS.
Android apps - Not the safest either really, but there are packs of them on private torrent trackers that’ll continue for a long while still.
News - Yeah paywalls are a bitch, sometimes you can kill em with UbO, sometimes they’ve been archived for free on archive, this is honestly the hard one here.
Porn - Fat chance. Idk what you’re talking about with the "porn piracy scene being small,” there are so many torrent sites both private and free and of course don’t forget Usenet, and even sites dedicated to leaking camgirl footage. Maybe it just seems small because even pirates can be embarrassed about porn lol, but trust me there’s plenty!
Sure, indexers can be taken down, like RARBG. So you can share torrent files on slsk (I’ve downloaded some rarbg torrents from there after rarbg’s collapse), or another site can pop up and host them either on the clearnet or on i2p. Torrenting may go somewhere technically speaking, but that “somewhere” isn’t “away forever” it’s simply “another domain, at worst i2p.”
Games - Nah that’ll continue on as it has, some get cracked and some don’t, it is what it is.
with Crowdstrike and other considerations… M$ already wants to close kernel access to their systems. This will make most DRM ineffective. I think games in specific will become significantly easier to crack in the near future.
Especially as linux handhelds continue to catch on and do their thing.
MS can’t close kernel access, that would be anticompetition. EU already ruled it illegal.
IIRC this was in regards to Microsoft wanting to close access to the kernel, while also still wanting to use kernel-level APIs for their security suite - which does come down to anticompetitive practices.
However, if Microsoft were not to offer separate products that used kernel-level APIs then in theory it would not have this same issue, which I assume is how Apple gets away with it. But, I am not a lawyer so its just speculation on my part.
So Windows should make security impossible
Can you provide the ruling?
As far as I understand it was simply an “agreement”. Not a legal decision/ruling. Nothing stops M$ from appealing it regardless with this new information. And pointing to MacOS and Android and asking why they’re not being enforced the same way.
And just because a current ruling OR agreement is in place. Doesn’t mean they don’t want to do it. They can easily just make the process harder for those that want Kernel access which could still have the same effect.
Games - alive at least as long as Empress is.
Edit: I expect controversy
I really hope i2p gets more usage and attention. I don’t know why it’s not seeing much traction even after the improved Windows installer
I’ve tried it a few times, back when Tails had it installed first, and then again a while later. I liked it but I do remember it being a pain to set up and having to have separate browser profiles and a bunch of mess, and qbit didn’t work with it yet so I had to have biglybt too.
Tbh I think it’d skyrocket if they’d release “their own browser” (which of course would just be firefox with i2p set up, like Tor). I seem to remember hearing something about them wanting to do that, too, so maybe?
I also seem to remember something about it being sort of slow but the longer you’re connected the better it gets or something? Which, cool, but I’m on a laptop, my uptime is nonexistent lol.
Some of this may have changed since I tried it last, definitely let me know. I’d love to get into it if I can tbh, I have usenet, slsk, a private tracker or two and all that, but more sources is always better, and last time I tried i2p I did find some shit I’d been looking for, but I just can’t be bothered to do all that mess to get it running just to barely use it, then do it all again every time I reinstall Fedora, I’d prefer a browser bundle.
It has a sleek Windows installer now so that people on there can use with minimal fuss. Still need to change the proxy settings in your browser after running the exe but that’s about it.
Linux still needs a bit of setup AFAIK but that’s fine, people on Linux usually don’t have a problem with that, they know what they’re getting into. I’m trying to read up on how I can mirror torrents on I2P alongside the clearnet. If I learn how to do so, I’ll seed my stuff on both (Qbit has good support now). I want a way to automatically add torrent listings from clearnet trackers to postman.
Yeah I can do it it’s just a pain in the ass to do it every install when I’m still mostly using the clearnet and have to change the browser settings back and forth every time I want to do the other thing. It’d be much easier for me if I could just launch “i2p browser” and be off to the races. Who knows, one day it may become imperative to use it if piracy is somehow stricken from the clearnet and then the work required becomes worth it for me, but as it stands now the effort required isn’t worth it for me yet.
I’d personally also like to see Jackett implement i2p tracker support so I could just use qbit’s search with the jackett plugin to search all the trackers I can at once, but idk if that’s even possible.
Use a different browser? Ungoogled-chromium will work the same as Firefox if you’re just doing I2P. I fail to understand your reasoning
Frankly I’d prefer it to be firefox based, since chrome is cancer and all. (Also I was under the impression it had to be firefox based, didn’t realize you could use chrome if you’re willing to install it. I don’t even want it ungoogled if possible tbh.)
Basically it just doesn’t seem to fit my workflow, I guess, unless I suppose I want to install chrome. Actually now that I say that, I use librewolf these days, I suppose I could just download regular Firefox and set it up for i2p permanently…hmmmm…maybe I will.
Can you explain the hate against Chromium? I understand if it’s a problem with Chrome specifically, but the Google parts are ripped out of Ungoogled-Chromium.
Edit: I recommend Mullvad and Librewolf for general-purpose browsing. You can even repurpose your install of TOR browser to use the I2P proxy and connect to I2P, but if you’re using an average OS you’d probably have to get your hands dirty to get two different installs of the same browser
IDK about movies/TV shows being in decline here, it seems to be in better shape now than when I first left the sea 15 years ago. New stuff, especially movies, hits the trackers way faster than they did “back then” and are easily available from public trackers. I can still find all the older things I want, granted some it only on the private trackers I’m using, but it’s being kept alive. Old or niche media has always been the hardest to find with torrents, but it really feels easier now than it did when I first started out 25 years ago.
As for books, I rent most of them from my local library as e-books, strip the DRM so I can read on me reader, and immediately return so someone else can rent them. I haven’t really needed to pirate a book in years by doing it this way.
I’m afraid to tell you that your e-book deDRMing is very much considered piracy. 😅
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.
I’m not sure how you can look at hundreds of years of IP laws getting btfo by pirates and say the ship is sinking 😂
I’m sorry, but until you can somehow answer the question of “how to make people avoiding laws impossible?” without causing a revolution, there will be laws avoided by people
No laws have ever stopped people from getting what they want. Games will be made by those who hate IP laws and be played by those who seek it. Will that scene be a trillion dollar industry backed by governments and international corporations like the AAA scene is today? Probably not. Will a punk indie scene exist? Of course.
Every popular entertainment medium that has a giant industry will see these same results as well. Movies, books, music, etc. As long as the medium is popular, it will persist outside of IP laws.
Same. Reading OPs list was like: “Wait is any of this becoming harder to pirate? At all?” Lol
Media piracy cannot be stopped. Don’t forget there was media piracy before the internet too. But back then it was physical piracy, and somebody made money on another’s work. That kind of piracy will always be shut down, because it is actually stealing. The fat cats want their money.
But now we have a different kind. More like Robin Hood. Digital piracy takes something and copies it, giving it away for free. The biggest risk for piracy, is that the content holders offer their product at a price so low, it would be horribly inconvenient to pirate it. For example if Apple Music just had you pay a few pennies per song instead of monthly. You’d load up $20 and listen to a lot of music. If TV series offered ad-free streaming for like $0.25 per episode. If movies could be watched for $1. If academic journal articles could be accessed for $1.
But that will never happen. They’ve done the math. They make more money with subscriptions and pricing right at the edge of affordability for many. Why would they want to make less money?
Actually now that I’m thinking about it. The way for them to hurt piracy the most would be to give away low-bitrate copies of everything for free. Stream all the music you want at 96 kbps. Watch every TV series or movie at 480p. Download this ebook as a plain text file. Read this article with tiny thumbnail photos. Free version of game has low-res textures and 720p at 30fps. Even that wouldn’t end piracy, but it would be a lot less popular. It would be harder to find somebody to invest the time bypassing paywalls when you can read the text easily.
Anyway torrent cannot be stopped. It’s moving to onion and i2p, fully decentralized. There will be nobody to take down. Besides that there’s always independent nations who don’t care about digital piracy, who can host private trackers.
Moving torrents to TOR is the worst idea I’ve heard in this thread
If the torrenting is moved entirely within Tor, and pirates hosted Relays alongside their seedboxes, then we would have the bandwidth to sustain it and not be constrained by the exit relays.
Have fun attempting to take down the decentralized torrenting network.
Unless p2p filesharing is declared illegal on the end user level and VPNs for filesharing are also declared illegal
VPNs for filesharing
I don’t think they actually can do that. There’s functionally no difference between VPNs for “not” pirating and VPNs “for” pirating, they’re all just VPNs.
It’s like saying they’ll ban 4 door sedans for drug buying, they can’t because they’re functionally the same as “4 door sedans for driving to work.” You literally cannot tell, if you see a guy driving an accord down the street, if that guy is on the way to work or on the way to buy coke. Similarly you cannot tell, if you see VPN traffic, what that guy is doing.
I may be wrong, but I don’t think they actually can do that. They’d have to ban all VPNs even for legitimate use, and the corporations that bribe our politicians use them. They could maybe pressure like Nord and Express to report pirates but mullvad will still be there.
There’s no way for the ISP or VPN provider to know whether that filesharing is a upload to some website or for torrenting.
Unless they monitor torrents via honeypot like they do sometimes (which is how letters are sent)
I’d be more worried about media than the ability to pirate it.
Music has adapted to generate plays. Platforms are already being polluted with genAI music.
TV was replaced by streaming services. Series come and go and are very specifically tailored to get people to subscribe. Exclusives are the standard. Single season productions are not uncommon. People are also already investigating ways to pollute this pool with genAI as well.
Movies are a stream of Marvel and Disney garbage that was already more CGI than acting. Now genAI and upscaled classics are on the menu.
Piracy will not go away. People used to record movies with camcorders in the cinema, now they pull raw files from CDN nodes. There is always the scene. The platforms that try to profit from the scene come and go.
