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.
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.
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.
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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
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)