I was a filthy pirate as a teenager, and in my early 20s, when I would balk at paying £20 in 1990s money to buy a DVD, or later in the early 2000s £60 for a blu

I was a filthy pirate as a teenager, and in my early 20s, when I would balk at paying £20 in 1990s money to buy a DVD, or later in the early 2000s £60 for a blu-ray. Then streaming arrived. I stopped pirating as finally I could pay for legal access to a couple (prime, netflix) of decent media libraries. Over the past few years, as the market has fragmented into a dozen £30 a month services, I started pirating again. I’m not spending £300 a month on streaming services, nor should anybody. Then, they started pulling content from their libraries, or editing it to suit today’s sensitive sensibilities - and this cemented my conviction that what I was doing was justified. Now that I have a vault stuffed full of UHD rips of a century of cinema, the other argument which has become self-apparent is quality. The UHD content streaming services serve looks like vegetable soup in comparison to a 70gb+ encode of a film, and is worsening as streaming services seek to be profitable. I see another cycle of the same type of anti-MPAA/RIAA movement brewing as was seen around deCSS etc. last time - as they are once again going down the same route of making the only offering a crappy and overpriced offering, and the alternative is easier than it ever was before.