If Buying Isn't Owning, Then Piracy Isn't Stealing...
Privacy invasions, inflated prices and empty game discs are pushing consumers to the brink of what they're willing to tolerate, forcing some of them to dust off their pirate hats and go sailing...
I want to preface this by stating unequivocally that you should in no way interpret this post as an endorsement of piracy. I am a firm believer that if you can reasonably buy something legally, you should. People deserve to be paid for their work, and as long as there is a reasonably accessible legal avenue for purchase, you should absolutely give your money to the folks who create the things you use and enjoy. These are simply my anecdotes and observations.
We have, for several years now, allowed ourselves to be lulled into the complacency of perpetual subscriptions to streaming services. The movie and music industries used to have a huge problem with piracy. I’m old enough to remember things like Napster, Kazaa, WinMX, Limewire and other applications that served as essentially one click gateways to piracy. Some of those applications might still exist, but they’re completely different than they were 20 years ago; folks like the RIAA saw to that. Back then, pirating and burning your own custom mix CDs was just as common, if not more-so, than seeing people with actual CDs that they bought from the store. Making a custom mix CD for your sweetheart was a common high school dating practice. Napster was one piece of software that was popular for a time, whose entire purpose was to faciliate peer-to-peer file sharing, a large portion of which was music. The practice of pirating music with Napster was so common and socially acceptable that Napster literally sold their own branded burnable CDs.
Industry heads fought back against the rampant piracy of their content in the courts and after years of litigation they finally found the solution, subscription based streaming services. Instead of demanding everyone pay $20 or more per album for a CD when most of the time they usually only want to hear one or two songs on that disc, or when they might want to listen to a custom playlist without having to swap discs, they would ask for a couple dollars a month in exchange for unlimited streaming access.
Netflix was a pioneer in this sector, but they didn’t start out as a streaming service. When I first signed up for Netflix they were still a DVD rental service. You paid your monthly subscription fee and in exchange you could select a DVD (and later Blurays) you wanted to watch. They would send it to you via regular snail mail and when you were done you could put it back in its envelope and send it back. Once it arrived they would send you the next disc in your queue. This was more convenient and accessible than piracy and provided a service that most people were ok paying for. Eventually Netflix moved to providing streaming and, in 2023, announced the end of their DVD rental program.
In the years since multiple streaming services have come onto the scene. The first one I remember caring about after Netflix was Hulu. Where Netflix specialized in movies (at first anyway), Hulu specialized in shows. So for a time, we had both a Netflix and a Hulu subscription. Hulu would give you access to the latest season or two of most shows for free, but paying for it ensured no ads and access to all the seasons they had access to for any show in their library. Again, paying for Hulu was more convenient, and between Netflix for movies and Hulu for shows, a new movement began to arise called “cord cutting”.
Growing up, just about everybody had a cable and, later, a satellite TV subscription. These were expensive, often over $50 or even $100 a month USD, and for the most part you couldn’t pick and choose individual channels you wanted. You had to pay for “packages” that bundled select channels into groups that you had to pay for all together. Oh and if you wanted something “special” like HBO or STARZ? Those channels cost extra all on their own. As a millennial, our parents had cable or satellite because, from my perception of their perspective, it was the new convenient thing and, for a generation of folks who grew up where one or two people in their community might have had a TV with a handful of over-the-air channels, it was an incredible life convenience to have your own TV with more channels than you could ever hope to watch or care about. For folks who grew up dirt poor, like my parents, having DirecTV with hundreds of high quality channels with no static or snow was the culmination of a lifetime of hard work.
But for my generation (I was born in 1987), by the time we reached adulthood, paying $50 or $100 or more a month for a television service where you didn’t care about 90% of the content that was on it seemed absurd. So, many of us first turned to piracy, at least to some extent, and then, when they became available, streaming services. And that’s how things have worked for a few decades now. Gabe Newell, the owner of the Steam PC gaming platform once said, “The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”
This statement, and the millennial aversion to paying for cable or satellite, even rang true to a certain extent with the older generation. When I was just a little kid I remember I had a family member (who is now deceased) who had a little side hustle where he would “burn” DirecTV and DISH network receiver cards. Basically you’d pay for your first month or two of service to buy and get all the equipment, then take the card out of your receiver and give it to him, along with a small donation, and he would re-write the contents of that card to unlock every channel offered by that service. It would last several months before the provider would catch on, at which point all those people would just bring their cards back to be “re-burned”. Even back then, folks weren’t happy paying exorbitant prices for a boatload of content they didn’t care about, so some of them started looking for better alternatives. Had they been able to pick individual channels, or had the prices been more affordable, there may not have been nearly as much demand for services like the one offered by that family member.
Streaming has reached their “card burning” or “cord cutting” moment. We’ve reached a saturation point. We’re at a point in time where everybody and their dog has their own streaming service, each with its own catalog of exclusive content. On top of that, prices are increasing, paid subscriptions no longer guarantee you won’t see ads, content is being removed from platforms on a regular basis because of licensing disagreements, content is being fragmented across multiple services and more. It’s now not unexpected for a family of 4 who likes different content to need 2, 3 or more different subscriptions, and at that point, between paying for multiple services at increased prices and still having to sit thru ads, what advantage do we really have over the generation before us who spent $100 a month on cable or satellite?
The gaming industry has been suffering at the hands of digital distribution as well. At first it was a convenience, especially with the XBox 360 and Playstation 3 era of consoles. By that time more people had access to broadband internet and both consoles came with built-in hard drives (mostly). Couple that with the fact that many games started receiving regular updates over the internet, some games had to be installed to your hard drive anyway and other factors, and many gamers started opting to buy their games digitally instead of on the physical discs. Sony even eventually introduced their “Playstation Plus” subscription where you got your choice of a couple free digital games added to your library every month.
With the advent of the PS4 and XBox One however, we started to see new trends. It was hinted at during the E3 showcases when Microsoft revealed the XBox One would have an always online “requirement” to even play offline single player games. During this console generation we also started to see cases where the physical “disc” of some games contained very little, if any actual content other than a digital license that would trigger the download of an “update” that amounted to the entirety of the game. With previous generations if you bought a physical disc you could play that game on a working console at literally any point in the future. There is no account sign-in requirement, no required download of the rest of the game, nothing. Sony could go out of business today and shut down all of their servers, and if you go pick up a Playstation 1 and a game, you can still sit down and play that game.
Fast forward to today and Nintendo has made empty media even more official with the release of their Nintendo Switch 2 console by giving developers the option of using a “Game key card”. Basically the idea is that you go to a store, buy a physical cartridge and put that in your console, but the only thing on that cartridge is a license key that triggers a download from one of Nintendo’s servers. That’s all well and good today, but what happens in 20 years when Nintendo inevitably shuts down those download servers? All those “game key cards” turn into e-waste. At least with a digital download you know, up front, that you’re tying your ability to play that game to the availability of that online service, but bastardizing physical media by turning it into a proprietary license key really feels like a bait and switch that contributes to plastic e-waste and offers no benefit over a digital download for most people. The issue with empty physical video game media has gotten so bad that there is literally a website called “Does It Play” where you can look up whether your disc or cartridge will actually let you play the game if you don’t have an internet connection, or if that company has shut down their servers for that game/console.
Microsoft has tried to capitalize on the move to an all digital future with their XBox game streaming service, and it does have its place, much like Netflix and Hulu before it, especially for folks where spending $60 on a single game sounds less palatable than spending $20 a month to stream a whole library of games to any device with a supported app or a Chromium based web browser. That said, the input latency, image and sound quality of streaming a game is far inferior to running it on your own hardware, and you’ll never own any of those games even if you “buy” them. You are completely dependent on the availability of Microsoft’s servers, your internet connection, and Microsoft’s willingness to keep providing that game to their subscribers. All too often nowadays, like video streaming services, games are censored or just straight up removed from digital storefronts after customers have already paid for them, sometimes without refunds. There’s a movement gaining traction called “Stop Killing Games” asking governments to force game developers to leave their games in some kind of a playable state so that after they are done hosting multiplayer servers, issuing patches or otherwise supporting a game, people who bought it can continue to play it in some kind of offline capacity.
A lot of what I’ve talked about up to this point can be summed up by the now infamous phrase, “You’ll own nothing and be happy”. It all feels like one giant conspiracy by global corporations to strip away the right of ownership. See if you have a Bluray or DVD player and you go buy a disc of a movie, you “own” that copy of that movie. You’ve paid for it once and you own it for as long as you have that disc and a player that can read it. If you buy a Playstation 2 game you own that copy of that game. You paid for it once and you can play it whenever you want without limitation as long as you have that disc and a console to play it on. If you buy a CD, you own that CD. You paid for it once and you can listen to it as much as you want as long as you have that disc and a CD player to put it in.
Therein lies the problem for corporations. When you have the option of owning something, they no longer have the ability to exercise leverage over you. Once you have a product in your hands, they can no longer exercise control over it. If you want to rip that music CD and put it on your phone, there’s nothing they can physically do to stop you. If your Playstation 2 doesn’t work any more, or you just want to have your game look better, you can pop that PS2 disc into a computer and emulate it instead of buying the game all over again for PC. Companies really want to control not just your access to media, but what you do with it and how you’re allowed to enjoy it, and one way to do that and maximize profits is to never “sell” you a product in the first place, but to string you along with perpetual rentals where you just keep paying them over and over, month after month. Some companies, like Nintendo, have literally destroyed lives because somebody hacked a Nintendo console they bought or emulated a game on non-Nintendo hardware, even if it was a game that Nintendo literally doesn’t even sell themselves any more.
I personally am a firm believer in “ownership”. Once I buy a product, I believe that I should have certain ownership rights over that product. If I buy a car and 10 years later want to swap a new engine into it, the manufacturer or dealership isn’t gonna tell me I can’t do that because it violates the terms of the sale. If I want to run that car off a cliff in Alaska and film it for YouTube, it’s mine to do so with. If I want to disassemble the engine and learn how it works or manufacture my own parts, install third party aftermarket mods, etc., it’s mine to do so with. I feel the same way about my media. I believe in buying and owning the content I consume. That belief was eventually the trigger that motivated me to start buying physical media and hosting my own personal server. I was re-watching one of my favorite shows, Farscape, on Netflix and one day when I tried to look it up, it was just gone; removed because of some licensing disagreement. So I hit up Amazon and picked up the Bluray box set so that now I own that copy of the show and nobody is gonna take it from me after the fact because two mega corporations couldn’t come to an agreement behind the scenes.
So what’s the solution? Well what “I” have been doing, for years now, is buying and digitizing physical media and, where possible, purchasing digital media that comes without DRM from the start. That means I’ve been spending an increasing amount of money on video games from platforms like “Good Old Games (GoG)” and “Humble Bundle” that give you DRM free copies of games that you can back up, make copies of, etc. without limitation. For all of my old school consoles that don’t have encrypted discs, such as the Playstation 2 and down, I’ve ripped all of those to digital files so I can emulate them on my PC with improved visuals and performance. When it comes to music, I’ve been buying DRM free downloads of albums I like from folks like “HDTracks”, “7Digital”, “Bandcamp” or the “Amazon MP3 store”, or I pick up CDs from Walmart or the Dollar Store and rip them to high quality digital files that I can do with what I want. This approach gives me freedom to enjoy all this content how I want. I can take those music downloads and put them on an SD card to listen to in our car, or stream them to my phone from our personal Nextcloud server. I can use those games as the basis for a custom modded experience on our desktop, or load them onto my Steam Deck for on-the-go handheld play.
When it comes to newer video game consoles, movies and shows, things are a bit more “gray”. I am not a lawyer, so don’t take anything I say as legal advice, but my non-expert understanding is that while yes, you can make personal backups of your own media for your own personal enjoyment or for personal archival purposes, the DMCA makes it illegal to break encryption, and basically all commercial DVDs and Blurays are protected by encryption. So yes, you can back up those discs so you can re-burn them and play them in a Bluray or DVD player, as long as you keep the encryption intact and as long as it’s for your own personal enjoyment. The law, and the extent to which it is enforced, varies from one jurisdiction to the next, so while it is “unlikely” you’ll get in trouble if you choose to break encryption in order to make your own custom copies of a movie (a playable MP4/MKV file instead of the full disc, for example), it’s not impossible because when you break that encryption, you are violating US federal law. That’s how Nintendo often gets people for playing ROMs of games they’ve legally bought. Sure, you can dump a copy of your Switch cartridge or Wii disc, but they are encrypted and Nintendo considers the encryption key proprietary information, so breaking the encryption is what violates the law and what is often used as the grounds to prosecute folks. They’ve even started banning the consoles of folks who played digital backups of their own games, even though those backups included the keys with them, which is going to create ripple effects in the 2nd hand market because they’re banning hardware from accessing online services even after a full system reset, not just peoples’ accounts.
We’re in a war for ownership of the content we consume. Each individual has to consider their ethics, how much they value long term ownership of their entertainment media and how that balances with the convenience they get from streaming services like Netflix and Spotify. However, I can tell that the landscape is shifting. Spotify recently announced that they’re going to start scanning your face or government ID if you want to access “explicit” content. Prices are increasing and paid subscribers are being subjected to advertisements regardless unless they pay even more for the super gold star plus platinum package. Content is being pulled out from under people because of licensing deals and censorship. People are getting fed up with the fragmented ecosystem of streaming services, all with their own exclusive content. Video game developers are implementing restrictive DRM that hurts performance and will literally lock you out of your game if you try to play it in too many places within a short period of time, such as might happen if you have a laptop, a desktop, a handheld, etc., or if you play on Linux.
It’s like Gabe Newell said, “The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.” Between encrypted Blurays and DVDs, DRM in video games, fragmented services all with their own exclusive content, sub-par stream quality and ads on paid services, physical media that doesn’t actually contain anything, invasions of privacy, the shutdown of online services and the removal of content, I’m seeing a resurgence in piracy discussions online. Folks on Reddit, Lemmy and other communities are asking how to circumvent copy protection or where to get content for cheap or free. The streaming services that used to be a panacea, that allowed people to stream whatever they wanted for a reasonable monthly fee, are now being used as mechanisms of oppression to juice as much money as possible out of customers while still subjecting them to ads, restricting their freedom and, often, giving them a sub-par experience. Even e-books are now being locked behind proprietary DRM that require you to use specific apps or devices to read them. Publishers are no longer offering a better product than the pirates, and are therefore re-creating the very problem they sought to solve when they started going after Napster 25 years ago.
I personally am going to continue, to the best of my ability, to continue giving my money to products and companies that support my right of ownership, and I suggest you all do the same. Buy physical or DRM free media now, while it’s still an option. Make backups of whatever you can. We’ve been comfy for a long while, but things are changing, and I’m not sure it’ll be for the better. Give your money to companies that actually respect the right of ownership. If you care about preserving great works of art and media for your future consumption, there might be a narrow window of opportunity to set yourself up for success. Disney is already ceasing the sale of DVDs and Blurays in certain regions.
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