Sailing the Digital Seas: The Online Piracy Renaissance

Between fragmentation, high subscription costs, and content takedowns, media piracy is experiencing a resurgence. Even as far back as 2019, it was seen as a major problem. (Credit: u/CORPZDUDE)

Let’s go back in time to 2007. Chances are, your household growing up had a television. If you were at least middle class, you probably had cable. Most of us who grew up around that time have memories of watching our favorite cartoons on Saturdays, bowls of cereal in our laps, or gathering with our family for a movie night. Maybe your service even let you watch certain shows and movies whenever you wanted, known back then as “video on demand.” I myself remember catching up on shows like Code Lyoko this way.

Of course, this luxury came at a price. In 2007, the average Comcast customer paid about $50 a month for cable ($78.80 in 2026 dollars), while Cablevision customers paid about $75 per month ($118.21 today). During this time, cable prices were on the rise, and by 2008 the average American cable bill had climbed to $71 per month ($111.90 in 2026).

It was in this context that a new way of watching TV came into being. Netflix, founded in 1999 as a DVD mailing service, introduced its “Watch Now” service on January 16th, 2007, debuting with about 1,000 titles. Compared to today, the service was primitive. It was available only in the United States, could only be streamed on Windows PCs, you could only watch six hours of content per month, and its 1,000 titles at launch pales in comparison to the 7,500 titles one can find on the platform today. The real value add was that these 1,000 titles could be yours for only $5.99 per month, a fraction of the cost of cable. Not only was streaming cheaper for audiences, but for streaming services themselves, who are no longer burdened by the costs of physical releases.

Now, the landscape has changed. Today, we have the choice between Netflix or Hulu or Disney+ or Apple TV+ or HBO Max or Tubi when looking for streaming, and that’s just the mainstream, general-audience TV and film services. Add in music and there’s Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, and Soundcloud. Rather than go to the local GameStop, gamers get their games from digital storefronts like Steam, the Nintendo eShop, Itch.io, the PlayStation Store, or the Microsoft Store. Now, subscribing to all the major US streaming services, without ads, is estimated to cost at least $150 per month, more than the average cable customer paid in 2007 when adjusted for inflation and does not include additional subscriptions for music or video games.

This sort of economic landscape is ripe for exploitative, anti-consumer business practices. Even beyond the rise in subscription costs in this time of rising costs of everything, consumers face diminishing quality even when they do decide to splurge on streaming. The assumption used to be that, if you pay for something, you get stable, permanent access to it. Today, this social contract has broken down through esoteric licensing regimes, crackdowns on sharing, draconian DRM, server shutdowns, delisting, and rotating catalogs. This issue affects not just movie and TV streaming, but music streaming services such as Spotify and online video game storefronts like Steam. I myself have fallen victim to this. One day, I wishlisted a game on Steam, since I wanted to wait for it to go on sale before I bought it. A few months later, I looked at my wishlist, only to find the price no longer visible. A click to the store page and I learn that the game was no longer listed on Steam, and thus impossible to play.

Impossible to play legally, that is.

All the talk of media piracy as a crime of theft distracts us from a more interesting idea: media piracy as a rational economic action from the perspective of a media consumer. “Rational” here means that piracy is a reasonable consumer response to low-quality service that does not justify its high cost; it is not a value judgment. When the sources of your media are fragmented, charge ever-increasing subscription prices, force you to wade through a river of slop to get at what you actually want to watch/listen to/play, and can be taken down at any time for any reason (or even no reason), is it any wonder why people are exploring piracy?

Piracy, in terms of technology, seems a bit old-fashioned to us in the 2020s. Most of us probably remember the “you wouldn’t steal a car” PSAs that played before every VHS or DVD movie you got from Blockbuster. But once streaming came about piracy seemed silly. Why risk your internet being cut off or a visit from the police just to save a few dollars a month or just to avoid a few seconds of ads every so often? At this point, a few dollars has snowballed into over a hundred, and “a few seconds of ads” is now more often than not over two minutes of unskippable marketing at the most inconvenient times – I’ve had ads play during YouTube videos that not only cut the speak off in the middle of a sentence, but in the middle of a word! It’s no wonder r/piracy has a membership in the millions as of this writing.

Piracy’s popularity remains locked behind technical “paywalls” that some web users may struggle to work with. The easiest ways to enjoy free copyrighted content are via malware-filled, ad-infested websites. Direct downloads are possible and safe from your internet provider’s watchful eyes, since the ISP cannot see the specific contents of files you download, but are time-consuming when bulk-downloading or downloading large files. Torrents, the classic pirate medium, require specialized software to do properly while hiding your activities from copyright holders and ISPs, who may do anything from send a sternly worded letter to your address to cut your internet off to send police to your door, depending on where you live.

The data show clearly that internet users are becoming more curious about piracy. A 2024 report by MUSO reveals that, in that year, visits to piracy sites rose to 216 billion, a sharp increase compared to the all-time low of 130 billion visits in 2020. In 2024, one-quarter of all media consumers in Sweden (home of both Spotify and The Pirate Bay) reported engaging in piracy, a trend mostly driven by teenage and young adult men. As Gabe Newell, co-founder of Valve, the company that owns PC gaming platform Steam – someone you would expect to be anti-piracy – put it in 2011, “piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue.” The data support this argument – media pirates are disproportionately higher-income in the United States, with piracy rates peaking in the $70,000-$79,000 income bracket and staying high even for households making as much as $200,000. Piracy is also popular among lower-income people, especially in poorer countries, who cannot afford to pay for their media, but clearly money is not the only reason piracy is so popular.

Most pirates are motivated by the prospect of free content, but another, perhaps more noble motivation can be interpreted. As we have seen, streaming services frequently pull down content that has no physical release, and many works of media, especially in purely digital formats, are at risk of being lost. To use just one example, the vast majority (87%) of video games released between 1975 and 2009 cannot be accessed outside either archives, the secondhand market, or piracy. This includes classic titles like Spec Ops: The Line, No One Lives Forever, and P.T. During the 2020s, multiple streaming services took down shows such as Infinity Train and Big Shot for tax write-down purposes; being streaming exclusives, these shows had no physical release. Most recently, in 2024, Ubisoft shut down the servers for its online-only racing game The Crew before revoking the licenses, without a refund, of everyone who owned it on Ubisoft Connect several weeks later, making it impossible to reinstall the game via that platform and nearly dashing any hopes of a fan recreation.

The 2000 video game The Operative: No One Lives Forever, created by Nightdive Studios, is acclaimed for its humorous spy-parody story and stylish 1960s-themed aesthetic. Since legal ownership of the IP cannot be fully established (Disney, Activision, and Warner Bros. all have legitimate claims) the game cannot be purchased legitimately as of this writing. Fans have kept the game alive through file-sharing. (Credit: Nightdive Studios)

What does all this tell us about the political economy of media piracy? We see that piracy is driven by the high cost of media, regional restrictions placed on digital media, and serves as a substitute for access to digital markets for those who cannot afford, or who choose not to pay for, such access. We also see that piracy increases when legal means become expensive or inconvenient for consumers to access legally. Thus, the biggest takeaway from this analysis is that people will increasingly turn to informal, unsanctioned systems for accessing resources, whether those resources are vital to survival or not, when legitimate means become too complicated or too expensive.

Even so, there are limits to what consumers will tolerate. Consumers tolerate inconvenience every day. They will wait in long lines, pay hidden fees, jump through complex return processes, deal with poor customer service reps (human or otherwise), and engage with misleading advertising if it means accessing a quality product or service. What many consumers, especially technically savvy ones, will not tolerate is a system that expects them to pay more to own less content that they may lose access to when its host decides to pull the plug. This is where piracy, as illicit as it is, gains legitimacy with the public.