It's much, much more than that. It's the only way to get an acceptable product. I have ALSO pirated everything I ever bought until very recently. DVDs includ

It's much, much more than that. It's the only way to get an acceptable product. I have ALSO pirated everything I ever bought until very recently. DVDs included region forcing, and forced, unskippable adverts and copyright notices. Netflix, .mkvs and .mp4s just have the programme and titles. Usually someone, somewhere, has put effort into making a good quality rip saving me the time doing so, along with synchronised and corrected subtitles. For games, the major studios still feel annoying and restrictive copy protection is the way to go. I don't want a £30 game that requires me juggling collections of plastic disks, or an always on net connection to a licensing server they may turn off in a year or two anyway. So the noCD, no licensing server release is a necessary download for me. I tend to mostly buy GOG and independent studios putting out DRM free things these days. EU IV being about the only exception I can think of in the last 2 years. I'm not a fan of being data mined on how often and how far I read ebooks, listen to audiobooks. So first thing on buying a new ebook from Amazon is rip the protection to read it on my non-amazon reader. First thing to do with an audible book is convert to mp3. If either of those became unfeasible or impossible I would stop buying. Finally for music, we've had attempts with copy protections and Sony rootkits, but mostly my music collection is complete and they gave up on silly DRM attempts. I only need to rip new stuff that's not available in FLAC.