Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. E.g., when Netflix was actually a good value proposition (i.e., high quality and quantity of content for the price), it was incredibly popular and nobody complained about their pricing. Now that barely anything looks like good value (thanks unfettered capitalism!), piracy is a more and more attractive option. That’s why the big corpos are trying as hard as they can to shut down piracy, so their customers have nowhere else to turn while they keep bumping up the prices for a shittier and shittier selection of content.

In a wide-ranging interview, Gabe Newell dishes about Steam, piracy and Half-Life 3.

The CEO and cofounder of Valve is never short on opinions. As the creator of some of the most beloved games titles (Team Fortress 2, Portal, Half-Life) and owner of the most pervasive online gaming portal for the PC platform, Gabe Newell has earned the right to express them. In an interview for the University of Cambridge’s school newspaper, Newell said that the way to end piracy is to provide a service that’s more complete than cracked software, and that restrictive DRM only encourages more piracy.

“We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem,” he said. “If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.”

The proof is in the proverbial pudding. “Prior to entering the Russian market, we were told that Russia was a waste of time because everyone would pirate our products. Russia is now about to become [Steam’s] largest market in Europe,” Newell said.

Source: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/Valves-Gabe-Newell-Says-Piracy-Is-a-Service-Problem/

IMO it’s important for pirates to stay up to date about things like DNS blocks etc so we can develop or implement workarounds as needed. For every story about some issue, the community will usually find a workaround pretty quickly. As you would have read recently, several of the major DNS players like Cloudflare, Google and Quad9 have all started enforcing court ordered DNS blocks on certain pirate streaming sites and indexers, because of repeated court cases against them by copyright holders and industry bodies.

But we already have good workarounds for this, e.g., spinning up a docker container with pihole-unbound or similar for access to root DNS servers, bypassing the need for downstream DNS providers like Cloudflare. A big part of the value of this community is that (almost) every time a problem crops up, someone will be able to suggest a fix, and often there’s already something available. Just use YouTube’s campaign against ad blockers as an example. ublock Origin and FreeTube (for example) usually release patches within hours or at most a day or two after each new crackdown attempt by Google.

Maybe we don’t do a good enough job of showcasing this, but piracy is alive and well in 2024. Torrents have been around for decades at this point and are still going strong. Same for Usenet. Pirate streaming sites are comparatively easy pickings for law enforcement, but that’s more of a game of whack-a-mole than anything else, as a new site will always turn up to replace whatever gets shut down.

So yes, there’s been a lot of shutdowns lately but it has barely affected the availability of pirated content overall. And with constantly improving tooling, like with the *arr stack of applications, piracy can now be automated and in many ways (i.e. functionality, not just pricing) provides a much better experience than most paid streaming services provide.

It’s always ethical to “steal” from greedy corporations. It’s just a form of wealth redistribution from the rich to the poor. If we can’t achieve that outcome legally, then the whole system is unethical, including the legal system.

If you are using Plex, you can also configure jellyseerr to monitor the Plex watchlist and it will then auto-grab any missing media via sonarr and radarr. That way they potentially don’t have to learn any new software. Not sure if overseerr can also do that as I haven’t used it, but may also be an option.