As long as The Pirate Bay is around, piracy will remain alive. Plenty of current stuff gets uploaded there. I too thought that piracy might be on its way out,

As long as The Pirate Bay is around, piracy will remain alive. Plenty of current stuff gets uploaded there. I too thought that piracy might be on its way out, but I think it will see a second life. More often than previous years have I been resorting to piracy. Why? Well, streaming catalogues have been trimming things because either their rights to an IP expired or for reasons unknown. Regardless, I had to pirate a film the other day because it disappeared from every streaming platform, and I know for a fact that I originally watched it on Netflix. In other cases, I pirate because the "HD" and even "4K" quality toted by these streaming services rarely lives up to its promise. Somehow videos served by a bunch of individuals far exceed the quality of videos I pay for almost every time. Bandwidth on my end has nothing to do with it. Sometimes I just don't want to watch something filmed in 2023 that looks like it was filmed on a potato in 2006, but films and shows can often look like that when streamed in my experience. Sometimes I get lucky, but it's annoying when the streaming quality hits a wall and doesn't improve. And I don't get my money back if the video never looks like HD even if I paid for the HD version. The more these companies crack down, the closer we are to the threshold where piracy seems fun and cool again. Also, pirates will always find a way. Something I watched recently that was pirated was actually a screen recording, and it looked pretty good. If DRM thwards screen recording, then pirates will hack together dummy monitors that encode the input to mkv. And if that doesn't work, there's still the analog hole.