Piracy Is Back: Piracy Statistics for 2023

There are many ways to look at piracy.

You can make a case for ethical use cases, for sure, as you've done. Piracy as a valuable tool for archival.

You can also make a case, not based on ethics, but to think about it as a way of consumers exercising control over their media consumption. If they don't like what's on offer from the big media companies (who exploit everyone in the production chain so enrich the execs and investors) then they can go somewhere else. With enough piracy, media companies are forced to provide a better deal. This is what lead to the creation of Netflix, and what led Apple to use their considerable market forces to get the industry behind DRM-free music. I think we can all agree that some balance of power between corporate behemoths and their customers is a good thing. In this model, piracy is actually a competitor in the media industry. You are competing for those customers. I think Netflix really understood this at the beginning, and it got gigantic by basically stealing customers from pirate sites.

Let's take another perspective to present on argument on whether or not to pirate media:

Pirated media, like a lot of illicit activities which takes place outside official channels presents a security risk. Never pirate any kind of software! This is how some of the great tragedies happen in infosec. I recall hearing some stories from security folks, about breaches which started as employees downloading cracks and keygens for photoshop and the like on work machines. Jesus H. Christ on a cracker. Music and movies, for savvy users, is significantly more safe since for the most part, those media files don't (or can't) contain executable code. There are edge cases, like abandonware where it is impossible sometimes to purchase the software you are looking for, and abandonware is relatively safe in the scheme of things.

Another argument: The socio-economic class argument. If you are not wealthy enough to afford what wealthier people (or people from wealthier nations) are paying for, it's OK to pirate it. It's harming no-one, as you were never going to be a paying customer in the first place. In some cases, whatever media may be impossible to legally purchase in your country.

There's also the techno-libertarian/pirate party perspective of "Information wants to be free", but honestly that's getting a bit abstract and I can't articulate well that perspective in a way that makes sense to me if you're talking about music and TV shows. Software though - reverse engineering software, and making your own version, I can get behind and it makes sense.

What I won't do is share which of these perspectives I live by, or tell you which perspectives you should live by (other than that second one: For god's sake don't pirate software for your own good). The "don't pirate software" was a talking point I recently wrote down in a Readme.txt for my nephews who are getting their first gaming PC's for Christmas (from myself and my brother).

> Sure, incomes have gone up. Prices seem to have gone up more. I fail to see how this is a meme.

It's a meme because of the "seem to have" part. You believe it because it feels true, even though it's actually false. People measure this stuff. What you say is wrong. Wages have grown faster than prices over the past 4 years. Period. You can't just throw out decades of research and process development on CPI indicators because of your Netflix bill!

> People measure this stuff. What you say is wrong.

Can you send me a link that shows measurements of:

a) X: The price of a specific standardized basket of goods used for CPI, broken down by exactly how much it cost in 2019 v/s 2023 (linking to a magic number for the whole basket is not acceptable, this needs to demonstrate exact prices of specific items, like the price of 160z of cheese. Varying baskets are also not acceptable, because then you're not measuring the same thing).

b) Y: The exact median income of a household in 2019 v/s 2023

I'll accept that prices have gone down and things have gotten better if X/Y as of 2019 is less than X/Y as of 2023.

> You can't just throw out decades of research and process development on CPI indicators because of your Netflix bill!

It's the other way round -- you can't just handwave some “decades of research and development” at people and claim that they should magically feel better off than four years prior. A lot of times this R&D is motivated by pressures that are unrelated to measuring the economic wellbeing of families, and any research is going to have its flaws that don't exactly match up to how the median family is feeling economic pressures. People who claim that the research is correct need to share specifics.

There are FRED charts elsewhere in this thread answering both your demands. But again, I don't care if you "believe" me or not. My point is precisely that your belief is decoupled from data. It's not my job to give you the data, it's yours. And by your own admission you don't want to do that. That's the problem.

Is it inaccurate if you set your country?