Happy cake day!

I used to buy a lot of films on VHS and later on DVD.

Then came bluray which was purposefully locked down tight so I couldn’t rip them and I couldn’t even play discs from other regions, plus the whole anti-circumvention legislation passed at the time meant that even after somebody cracked its DRM it was hard to get your hands on good tools to rip the disks.

As by then home internet speeds were high enough, I switched to pirating that kind of content.

Streaming came along but it was already obvious back then that the customer didn’t own the media - you couldn’t just download a non-DRM-locked video file and watch it whenever and wherever you wanted because nobody would sell that to you, they would “keep it” for you in their systems or send it DRM locked and kept control of when you could access it with some kind of “phone-home” unlocking mechanism - so I never subscribed to any streaming services.

I have literally pirated all video content since the mid 00s.

Meanwhile, like you, in contrast and thanks mostly to GOG, even though I can pirate my games, I just buy them instead. Steam is a bit more iffy because they have the whole “phone-home” control thing and although their DRM isn’t really tightly locked and you can easily go around it, in my view the intention is there to restrict your freedom, so I’ve only bought a handful of games on Steam (and, curiously, recently I had to turn to piracy because one of those games wouldn’t run on Linux but a pirated version of it ran just fine).

I’m perfectly willing and capable of buying the content, but it has to be free for me to use (same as in the old days, before phone-home DRM, a Game or Movie DVD was free for me to use) and in my possession not in a “trust me this is yours (but not really as per an obscure paragraph in a Terms & Conditions agreement which is 50 pages of legalese)”.

Meanwhile, if I want to watch the same show/film jy “alternative ways”, I just go to stremio, search for it, and watch it. No questions asked, no geoblocks, no services to search for in them and painless overall.

It IS a service problem because it really is harder to watch it legally.

This is a big reason why I have a problem with streaming services these days. With anime, it can get worse when some services only stream in Dubbed or Subbed where you want the opposite. And even with a great fiber optic internet connection the streaming sites will reduce your playback quality like mentioned above, to the point where a few times now I’ve opted to find and download the show elsewhere even though I’m subscribed.

It’s akin to a dealership selling someone a car and then bricking it without warning because the manufacturer didn’t want the dealership selling that car anymore.

We’re at the end stage of literally a century of corruption in the domain of Intellectual Property.

All that it takes is to look at how Copyright used to be 20 years, after which the works were in the Public Domain (in other words, for 20 years the public enforced an otherwise impossible right - as intellectual anything being property is not a natural thing - for somebody to have a monopoly on reproducing some intellectual creation and the quid pro quo was that after 20 years everybody had free access to it), and then over the 20th Century it kept getting extended and extended to the point that now in most countries is around 100 years after the death of the author, so in average copyright lasts about 125 years, so for example YOU WILL ALMOST NEVER be free until the day you die to access a musical work which you grew up with in your teens.

The whole thing was a massive corrupt landgrab, only the “land” wasn’t actually physical but an artificial kind of property that would not exist otherwise, created by artificially restricting what the many could do, an which was continuously expanded by extending those restrictions to increase the breath of said “property”, mainly for the benefit of a few.

This didn’t just happen in Copyright, by the way, things like Business Method Patents are also another corrupt expansion of intellectual property, though those haven’t spread outside the US quite as much as the “longer than a human being’s lifetime” Copyright periods.

I don’t think downloading the titles is enough. While you and me may have enough space in a spare HDD for every movie we ever purchased, my parents certainly don’t have enough space on their iPads; and even then they wouldn’t be able to watch them in their living rooms. These digital storefronts should be forced to serve the movies they sell for streaming indefinitely so people like my parents have a way to watch the content they paid for with the same simplicity they had when they bought them

indeed. I’ll admit I used to frequently use fitgirl and dodi repacks but dodi retired and for whatever reason i can never get fitgirls stuff to work anymore on Linux. Steam it just works.

So they wouldn’t get money from you anyway!

Broke mfs will still pirate no matter what, yes of course. 😅