I’ve been saying this for 30+ years. Piracy is by large NOT a group of people looking to avoid paying for a product.

Piracy is often the result of your product being either unavailable to purchase at a reasonable price, or difficult to comply with the law.

I saw an NFL schedule for my local team at a bar recently. Every week it’s a different time, different network, some aren’t even airing over OTA, it’s on Amazon Prime…for 1 game. Nobody is going to pay $120 for a year for amazon prime, to watch 1 game for 3 hours.

That shit is what led to piracy.

Metalica loved to bitch and complain, about Napster giving away their songs. It’s not THEIR fault per se, so I do see them as also the victims, but the whole industry was fucked back then.

You’d pay $20 for a CD of some band, and find out 16 songs, and you like 3 of them. $20 in 1999 would be like $35-$45 today.

Then you’d find out Napster exists, and you can download JUST those 3 songs. You were willing to pay a reasonable price for those 3 songs, but the record labels wouldn’t take your money. Not unless you wanted to buy either the full album, or a singles disc which only had their radio releases that THEY picked.

Then after napster died, Apple says “hey, what if we charged $0.99 for 1 song, as picked by the user? A full album in this way would still be close to $20, but we don’t have a physical good to ship and pay labor on.”

And THATS when digital music really took off. Because they made a buttload that year. Record labels FINALLY realized people will pay if you offer a product, easily available at a reasonable price. Suddenly profits in the music industry which had been declining for a decade, were booming. Piracy was on the decline.

And yet the video industry never learned this lesson. Netflix came in, boom, all this money to be made from subscribers. It was cheap, it was all in one place, and it was easy.

Then over 10 years every channel has a video service.

And prices are increasing.

And account sharing is being cracked down on.

So it’s no longer easy, it’s no longer cheap. It’s no longer…oh hey, piracy is on the rise.