Was not expecting to hear "shut the fuck up you fucking corporate bootlicking simp" from Louis Rossman of all people. He's pissed and rightly so.
I'm generally pretty anti-piracy but it's getting harder and harder to rationalize the act of paying for things through legitimate channels when customers are punished in the oh-so-many ways Rossman described. Disney think this is a "GOTCHA" moment that will absolve them of legal responsibility for someone's death at one of their theme parks, but this is an absolute PR disaster for them.
As someone who has never had much disposable income, piracy has helped me and countless folks enjoy things we otherwise would not have been able to realistically afford. It also helps make educational material far more accessible, particularly when it comes to textbooks, academic papers (i.e. SciHub thanks to Alexandra Elbakyan), even complete semester university-level lectures.
If wages were higher and media was offered in a format that was a) not subscription based and b) reasonably priced, people would be more likely to buy content instead of pirate it.
Beyond that, people are sick and tired of things like their favorite TV show or my music disappearing because the streaming site lost the streaming rights to a competitor. Or an artist's discography missing a huge chunk of their music because of some record label legal nonsense.
The problem is that everything is becoming subscription based these days and it's weird to require that kind of committment if you just want to listen to one artist's album, or a few episodes of a nature documentary.
Personally, I pirate terabytes of content and I try to buy used Blu-Ray 📀 discs and CDs every now and then. I have a nice external disc readers/writer connected to my PC and an elaborate multi-output audio setup, but most people don't have a disc reader these days. So the problem is instead of just giving people the option of purchasing an actual file like an MKV, FLAC + MP3 files, these companies insist on forcing a subscription as the only feasible option since they know 99% of people don't have or want to deal with disc readers and physical media.
I get that your comment was less about anti-piracy and I'm kind of going on a rant here, but I really hope my comment helps you better understand at least some of the reasons why people pirate stuff. Even when I did research science, we'd all use SciHub because it was a million times easier to just go on there and search for one or several papers, instead of having to use our login credentials to get into several different databases for multiple papers in different fields. So so so annoying!
I think with piracy, there are many measurable and immeasurable benefits felt by society because of piracy.
I'm not the original person in the thread, but I'm pretty anti-piracy. However, the bulk of my media spending is on musicians (with direct buying from an artist being my primary means of purchase).
With that said, I absolutely understand why so many people pirate movies/tv. Streaming for those is an absolute shit show.
The thing that kills me is there is no way to buy movies/tv shows without DRM. I don't want my content locked to some service that can dissappear at any point.
Music, Games, books/comics, all have DRM free options (although games are more miss than hit in that regard).
I agree with (and experience) the problems surrounding access to media that you described, but I would also describe myself as pretty anti-piracy. You can be anti-middleman and anti-rent-seeking without being pro-piracy. While piracy circumvents the problems you mentioned, the question it leaves unanswered is how the creator of the pirated media will afford basic necessities like food and shelter. Alternatives to streaming are scarce, but they do exist-- especially DRM-free music and books. These are not static systems. The market will follow the money, so if folks buy into the false dichotomy of stream vs pirate, industry will continue to invest in DRM and anti-piracy measures and creators will continue to submit to streaming services / media silos. I'd prefer a system with as few layers as possible between creator and consumer. Piracy only offers a solution for the latter.
the question it leaves unanswered is how the creator of the pirated media will afford basic necessities like food and shelter.
Under the current capitalist system, they don't. Scientists often have to pay the publisher to have their work published, often receiving nothing in return. Services like spotify pay next to nothing to creators that aren't already at the top.
There will be no solution to this problem until the underling source (capitalism) is dealt with. Piracy is just a stop gap that fucks over the CEOs and shareholders until the problem is dealt with. An before anybody brings up indy games/music/etc bought directly from the creators, that's a different story obviously.
This is the same company that defended themselves by claiming that a "no swimming" sign was good enough warning after a families young kid was eaten alive by an alligator.