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- videogamesm12
As streaming has become the predominant way in which we consume media with the rise of the Internet, we must ask ourselves to balance the financial costs of consuming media with the literal costs of how we consume it. This is a lengthy and complicated topic, but I’d like to narrow down on a very small piece of the puzzle: the matter of ownership.
Steam is one of the most popular ways to get games for the PC. Despite having a fairly pro-consumer stance in a lot of ways (frequent sales and discounts, supporting the Linux gaming community, fairly lenient and hands-off anti-cheat), you cannot play games you own on it without first logging in with your account. While this isn’t a problems for those who are running the latest and greatest hardware and software, this becomes a major problem for those who want to experience older games as they were on era-appropriate computers because the software that carries the DRM itself no longer supports anything older than Windows 10. Since said computers most likely can’t comfortably run those newer versions of Windows, they are effectively unable to play the games they bought ages ago because their computer, once perfectly capable of playing the game, isn’t supported anymore. Even those who got the boxed copies of some games have to install and run Steam, which means that those who got the physical copies of games still can’t play them even though their hardware should and would run the game without any problems.
Fallout 3 was released for the PC in 2008 and, even in the Steam release, came bundled with the truly terrible Games for Windows LIVE – Microsoft’s own attempt at making the next Steam. Even after that service was discontinued in 2013, you still needed to install it just to play the game. This became extremely difficult because at some point Microsoft decided to nuke GFWL entirely from their downloads, making it impossible to actually install and play the game without either having to dig through the depths of Google to find an installer that worked or using a mod that completely removes it (in other words, a crack). Meanwhile, the pirates had a crack out within hours of the game’s original release and were enjoying the game free of any account requirements. Only in the year 2021 did Bethesda finally decide to actually remove the game’s completely unnecessary dependency on the long since dead service, which was done with an update.
In 2013, EA released a game for the PC and Mac that attempted to reboot the long-dormant SimCity franchise. The horrific launch caused by the completely unnecessary DRM is what killed it – in order to play the game, you needed an internet connection at all times and the ability to actually connect to EA’s authentication servers. On launch, consumers were unable to play the game they paid $60 for even in singleplayer because the servers they needed to connect to were constantly overloaded and unable to handle the stress of people actually wanting to play their game. Worse yet, even if you did manage to connect to their servers, you were literally put in a waitlist just to start the fucking game. As you can imagine, those who reviewed the game on platforms like Amazon were pretty unhappy about this. Within 3 months of this disaster of a launch, a crack was released which let you to actually play the game offline. It took an entire year for EA to release an patch that would achieve the same thing.
One of the worst experiences I had – and I am still extremely salty about it – is the time I dared to play the PC version of UNO (published bySatan’s Henchmen Ubisoft). I had purchased it on Steam. I expected to be able to open it and run it from there like literally every other game. Instead, I was greeted with the installer for another piece of software entirely called Uplay (now known as Ubisoft Connect) and then was told to log in or create an account on their ecosystem. If I didn’t do this, I couldn’t play the game. I had to create another account on a completely different platform just to be able to play the game that I purchased on Steam. This means that even if I use Steam’s “offline mode”, Ubisoft’s knuckle-headed unnecessary galaxy brain system prevents me from playing what I legally bought and paid for in an offline environment. You have to jump through all of those hoops just to launch the PC port of a freaking card game and even then you still get screwed over as the consumer. You get this awful inconvenient experience all for the insane price of $9.99, which is for some reason even more expensive than a card deck!
In the early 2000s, Sony BMG decided to try curbing music piracy by intentionally crippling the physical media releases of music with so-called XCP copy protection, which required you to install incredibly sketchy pieces of software onto your computer just to play and copy the music on it. Said software hijacked certain parts of Windows under-the-hood in order to obfuscate what in tarnation it was doing (much in the same way that a rootkit does), indirectly caused the computers it was installed on to have reliability issues with system crashes galore, and added a bunch of extra vulnerabilities to your computer that could and would be exploited by viruses to do a bunch of other nasty things to it. Your natural response to such issues would most likely be to try to uninstall it, but that’s where the second kick-in-the-nuts came into play – it intentionally hijacked your computer to prevent you from even finding it to uninstall it. This entire situation was unraveled by an employee at Winternals (later part of Microsoft) who discovered it while testing software intended to detect rootkits and published their findings on their blog. Sony’s response was at first to deny its harmfulness and release a “removal tool” which sucked major donkey balls (it only un-hid the DRM from you, collected your email address for some reason, and installed what was effectively a backdoor in your computer), and then eventually recalled all of the CDs with the stupid protection on it along with releasing a proper removal tool. Of course, the last part only happened after Sony was sued for their tomfuckery.
The issue also applies to games as well. Computer games from the early 2000s often came with different kinds of copy protection which usually required you to insert the game’s CD into your computer. StarForce was used to do this back in those days and was particularly nasty as it nested itself deeply into your computer once installed (it literally installed itself as a system driver and thus had an insane degree of control over your computer) and was claimed to cause system instability when doing things not even related to playing the game. Worse yet, removal was difficult – uninstalling the games that came bundled with the protection didn’t remove the protection itself and so-called “removal tools” that were offered sometimes just didn’t work at all or left behind some remnants. On modern computers, the issue is actually amplified because modern versions of Windows outright refuse to boot if you install a game with this bundled with it. I have had personal experiences with this problem as I once installed an old PC game from ~2005 onto my Windows 10 laptop and was kindly greeted by Windows failing to boot afterwards because StarForce installed itself as a driver. I had to manually remove it using the recovery menu Windows provides just to get my computer to boot again.
Anti-cheat and DRM often aim to achieve the same thing: prevent the end user from tampering with their software. They claim it’s for “your security” or (in the case of the anti-cheats) to “keep things fair”. But what happens when a big company responsible for their tamper protection abuses their intentional opacity to secretly use your computer for their own gain? This actually happened in 2013 when the E-Sports Entertainment Association League (ESEA League) was caught using people’s computers to secretly mine Bitcoin after some more technically-inclined users noticed that the anti-cheat was using a considerable amount of their computer’s resources and looked deeper into the issue. The co-founder of the ESEA League claimed that their secret cryptocurrency mining operation was a feature that they were considering. They settled for $1 million to avoid being criminally prosecuted.
I’d like to stress that these issues affected legitimate consumers who paid actual money and played by the companies’ rules. They went the legal route as intended and still got screwed in the end, while the pirates (the folks who didn’t play by the rules) were able to freely enjoy the media issue-free after a crack inevitably came out for them.
There are some companies that offer compromises which are exceptions. In the music sector, Bandcamp is allows you to stream music but you can buy albums/individual songs that you can legally download later on to DRM-free format. In the games sector, GOG (also known as Good Old Games) is a platform that lets you buy and download games in a matter similar to Steam, however the main difference is that none of the games include DRM when you download them. While these services still rely on the status of the company behind them staying around for the downloading part, once they’re downloaded you can use them whenever, wherever, and however you want (including copying and archiving them). Unfortunately, these platforms are the exception, not the rule.
There is no authentication or other big tech account requirement in place for you to enjoy a movie on Blu-ray. You don’t even need to be connected to the internet to play it. You just plop it in your player and it’ll work. This guarantees that you will still be able to watch Space Jam on Blu-ray no matter where you are, how much society hates you, or how badly decayed society actually is.
prettier , and that Comedy Central who is afraid of threats from extremist terrorists won’t be able to remove a potentially offensive/sensitive scene that mocks a religious leader.
DVDs can be ripped using programs like Handbrake once provided with a file containing the appropriate instructions. Blu-ray discs can be liberated using programs like MakeMKV which will take the contents of the disc and convert it to a royalty-free format without any form of DRM. You can then later on do whatever you want with this freshly-liberated digital copy like converting it to a different format, copying it onto another hard drive, or even playing it on whatever supports it.
While I doubt that you would get into deep trouble with the law because you shared a copy of Shrek 2 with your friends, casually watched a single movie from 123movies, or downloaded a movie like Oppenheimer for your own personal use, the risk is still there and is a good reason to use a VPN if or when you do decide to sail the seven seas.
If you sail the seven seas and your ISP finds out you’ve been naughty, there’s a good chance they will send you a notice threatening to suspend or terminate whatever services they are providing you if you don’t immediately stop. If you keep doing it and they find out, they will actually go forward with these threats and start messing with your service. If you still keep going despite all this, they will terminate your internet service and you’ll have to find another service provider. While this can be mitigated with a trustworthy VPN, the risk is still there and it is one you should take seriously.
Downloading pirated content is a lot like having sex with a hooker from the streets of Detroit: if you’re not careful you will catch something truly nasty. You have to remember that you’re downloading from a very seedy part of the internet from websites that have to resort to sketchy advertising agencies just to operate. While the days of downloading MP3s only to be jumpscared by crazy Russian scat porn are long since over, the risk of getting infected with a backdoor that was in something you downloaded from an untrustworthy source will always be there and you will end up paying for it in the long run.
That may sound scary, but if you proceed with extreme caution and use your common sense, you should still be perfectly fine by the end. Examples of good general advice include always checking the file extensions of what you download to make sure that it is what it says it is (e.g. don’t try to open an MP4 file if it has an “EXE” at the end), using an ad blocker, and only going with reputable sources.
As the one who wants to consume pirated content, these universal standards mean a few things to you. For one, the media will have the same format every time which makes playing them back much less of a hassle for those who want to organize them in a particular way. For two, the media itself will work across all kinds of platforms including game consoles, DVD/Blu-ray players, mobile devices, and computers. For three, the universal standard ensures quality control in the pirated content so that things like unnecessary filters or overzealous upscaling, which could ultimately impede your experience, do not happen.
The fecal foundation for the software industry was laid in early 2013 when Adobe decided while twiddling their thumbs like a Saturday morning cartoon villain that their paying customers shouldn’t be allowed to pay once for a product and be able to use it forever. So, they came up with the brilliantly terrible scheme of making it so that you are basically required to rope yourself into their Creative Cloud subscription service if you want to have access to the likes Photoshop and Premiere. Instead of being able to pay a hefty upfront cost to be able to run the same piece of software for years to come, you as the consumer are required to constantly give them money every month just to be able to use the program and even after paying thousands of dollars you still lose access to the software you sunk a lot of money into the moment you stop paying for it.
Over the course of the past few decades, the music industry has shifted from physical media releases that will last lifetimes (or even generations) to an internet-reliant, lossy, and inconvenient nightmare. As previously mentioned, you now have to pay a subscription ($12 a month) to be able to listen to music without getting screamed at with annoying advertisements or without an internet connection. In the past, it didn’t matter where you were or if you had an internet connection, you could still listen to music without any problems as long as you had a CD with the MP3s or whatever burned onto them. I can’t listen to a Daft Punk album while I’m in an area with no internet anymore because it requires me to use my smartphone and the DRM in the downloaded music needs to connect to the internet to make sure I’m still subscribed and therefore “entitled” to the music. I’ve noticed that most albums aren’t easily available in a physical form or even in a DRM-free format anymore.
The games industry is a shadow of its former self. Mainstream publishers aren’t even trying to hide the fact that they can’t be bothered to make games you’ll be able to play and experience years from now, let alone ones that don’t suck. A director from Ubisoft (Philippe Tremblay) has been quoted as saying that “gamers are used to […] having and owning their games” and then expressing his belief that such a trend should shift so that we the consumers are more comfortable with not owning the games we pay for. They then tried to bring reassurance by stating “[the consumers] will see that these games will exist, the service will continue, and you'll be able to access them when you feel like.” Really? In an industry that peaked years if not decades ago and is now showing signs of decline across the board, you’re going to have the balls to imply that the service will always be around when your very same company killed off the servers for an old game that came out 10 years ago and made it completely unplayable even offline? Even beyond the blatant contempt for the consumer’s wishes to own the games they pay $60 for and complete disregard for the longevity of their products, the contents of the games themselves have become a sewage silo from all the enshittification. Unique and memorable games have become the exception instead of the rule, with most games now being primarily profit-driven. What was once a one-time $60 payment to have access to everything a game had to offer during its lifecycle (which really encouraged the developers make the game as good as possible instead of half-assing everything) has been infested by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: day-one DLC (which realistically should have just been included into the base game), “season passes”, pay-to-win mechanics that encourage microtransactions, and lootboxes which is just video game gambling. Franchises like Call of Duty (which was once a great franchise that had some incredible stories and innovative gameplay) has devolved into the publisher repeatedly polishing the same turd with mechanics like those noted above thrown into the mix for extra profits. When people try to go back to the older games to try to improve them (or at least make them more safe to play) with mods so that other people who own the game can enjoy them more, they end up getting DMCA’d into oblivion with the excuse of “copyright infringement” just because it cuts into the profits of the latest and greatest generic first person shooter.
If these industries can get you to switch from physical media, they’ll be able to more thoroughly control what you can watch and they’ll be able to hike the prices of their services artificially once they have an excuse to so that you have to pay more for what is effectively less, and given the trend of enshittification that is happening as we speak, I am absolutely certain that they will do this. They claim pirates are the thieves, but then actively do everything they can to steal the definition of ownership from us, the consumers.
This issue isn’t even exclusive to Netflix. Other services have been taking notes. At the beginning of last year, Amazon Prime Video, once a somewhat expensive but pretty decent service, started shoving ads down your throat and the only way to get rid of them is to pay an extra $3 a month. YouTube, once a wonderful place for people to express themselves, enshittified itself so badly over the course of a few years with increasingly aggressive advertising that using it is now practically unbearable without an ad-blocker and the revenue for the people making videos on it (which is supposed to come from those advertisements) has become an unreliable gamble where they are constantly in fear of being demonetized and have to make sure that their videos are “advertiser-friendly”.
With the state and trajectory of the economy in mind, ask yourself these questions: is it worth having your experience get worse as time goes on because the company behind it needs to appease investors? Is it worth giving increasingly desperate companies more power and more control over your daily life and the content you consume? What are you putting at stake by allowing these companies to control how you access your content? What will these companies do next to ensure they still make a profit?
We could have had digital audio as early as the 1980s
Instead of having to deal with analog audio cassette tapes for decades, we could have had a digital audio format as early as the 1980s. The DAT (Digital Audio Tape) was exactly this – an audio cassette format that stored music digitally with 1s and 0s instead of with wavelengths. The quality of the music would instead depend on the actual contents of the tape and quality of the player instead of additional factors like the tape’s materials and how the tape was mastered. Despite this, the format failed to catch on. The music industry resisted this innovative format every step of the way.
Industry parasites like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) first lobbied against the format’s introduction and threatened to sue anybody who tried to bring it to the United States. Later on, they also tried to add restrictions to prevent people from recording onto the tapes from mediums like music records, CDs, or even regular audio tapes through legislation. CBS Records tried to introduce a system to detect and prevent recorders from recording from those formats using a notch filter applied to the source, but it really sucked. Despite empty claims and promises that you wouldn’t be able to hear the difference, most people were able to hear it and it was awful. According to some claims, it also didn’t even do its job well.
The format failed, and the masses didn’t get a mainstream digital music format until the CD and its recordable variants went mainstream in the 1990s and early 2000s.
MP3 players and their massive success almost didn’t happen
In September 1998, Diamond Multimedia introduced the Rio PMP300, one of the first portable MP3 players that let you copy songs onto it and play it with you on the go. It was a huge success during the holiday season that followed, but of course the music industry had to stomp their feet and try to stifle yet another massively innovative product because they didn’t try to do anything with copy protection.
The leeches of the RIAA, probably rubbing their nipples like the cable company employees from South Park, sued Diamond Multimedia in the following year claiming that MP3 players enabled people to copy music and thus should be illegal, even though the player in question had absolutely no recording capabilities. The legality of portable MP3 players hinged on this lawsuit, and thankfully for the consumer, Diamond Multimedia won the lawsuit in part thanks to a prior ruling in the Sony vs. Universal Studios lawsuit that happened in the 1980s which made home VCRs legal. This ruling made it clear by and large that MP3 players were legal and in the following years, MP3 players exploded in popularity and quite literally changed how we purchased, consumed, and listened to the music we own.
The RIAA selfishly attempted to take down a popular YouTube video downloader
Like Wile E. Coyote trying to catch the Roadrunner but failing to learn his lesson every time, the RIAA decided that YouTube-DL (an extremely popular public domain piece of software that allows you to download and archive videos from websites like YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, TikTok, and more) was a hotbed for music piracy that needed to be wiped off the surface of the Earth.
They went looking for an excuse to get the project taken down so that they could justify a legal-sounding argument to pull deeply out of their anal cavity like a prostate exam, and they found one – the test scripts the program used at the time to verify that the program worked correctly (a very common practice in the software development industry, mind you) linked to music videos that were on YouTube. Finally, something that they could use to claim that the program’s intention is obviously to steal music (even though it wasn’t). On October 23, 2020, they struck with a vengeance. They wrote up and sent a DMCA request to GitHub, the website hosting the source code for the application, demanding that the program be taken down. GitHub understandably obliged and removed the project entirely.
Artist depiction of the RIAA writing the DMCA letter
Unsurprisingly, the response from the general software community was one of extreme hostility and distaste. YouTube-DL had tons of legitimate use cases including news reporting, archival of content at risk of being deleted, and educational uses (especially during the COVID-19 pandemic where everyone had to stay home even if they didn’t have the best internet), and the RIAA, seemingly completely unaware of concepts like the Streisand effect and the possibility that not everyone who uses archival software is a dirty pirate determined to steal music, decided that nobody should be allowed to download videos because of the off-chance that someone were to download music with it. The Streisand effect almost immediately kicked in massively. The program’s source code was reuploaded on a large scale under new repositories or pull requests to the DMCA repository itself, encoded and posted onto websites like Twitter using images, and more.
On November 16, 2020, a lawyer from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sent an elegantly-written letter to GitHub outlining the functions of YouTube-DL, effectively debunking the RIAA’s claims of the program being used to circumvent any forms of copy protection or that the program encourages copyright infringement, and slam-dunking the RIAA’s attempt to use German court rulings in the context of a U.S. court. GitHub responded to this by putting YouTube-DL back up, rejecting the original DMCA takedown request, and promising to change how they handle similar requests in the future.
They abuse the legal system to get their way
The concept of a legal system is intended to be fair, maintain order, punish people who break the law maliciously and intentionally, and guarantee equal justice and freedoms for everyone. I’ve witnessed multiple examples of big companies abusing this system to punish people who get in the way of their profits even if they’re sharing like 10 MP3 files online or telling people how to jailbreak their own game console.
In early 2010, George Hotz (a renowned software engineer previously known for hacking the iPhone) managed to hack his PlayStation 3 and subsequently published his findings on his website. Sony entered a game of whack-a-mole with Hotz. In an update, they completely removed the component Hotz was using (known as OtherOS), which ended up pissing a lot of people who were using their console as a Linux box (which was something that Sony was completely fine with and even supported!). This led to a dedicated effort by different groups of very smart people to hack the console again and shatter its security, culminating in a presentation given by fail0verflow in which they reveal a way to reverse engineer the console to get the keys that the system used to ensure that a piece of software is legitimate. This was found through reverse engineering efforts and not through any form of illegal measures. They didn’t reveal the key themselves, but Hotz did on his website in January 2011 (along with download links to tools that allow you to hack your own console) while stressing that he does not condone piracy. As a show of good faith, he added a piece of code to his hacking tools that would prevent people from playing pirated games.
Sony didn’t care about his good faith effort, and sued him anyways along with members of fail0verflow claiming that they facilitated copyright infringement. Although somewhat understandable, Sony then decided to kick the hornet’s nest: they turned their attention to the people accessing and supporting George’s work and deemed them to be dirty pirate criminals too. They sent subpoenas to companies like Google (responsible for hosting Hotz’s blog in regards to hacking the PlayStation 3), Bluehost (responsible for hosting Hotz’s website), and YouTube, demanding information about people who accessed, downloaded, or interacted with anything made by Hotz in relation to the PlayStation 3. In other words, if you downloaded tools by Hotz or even commented on his blog or YouTube videos, Sony wanted your information. They claimed that this was strictly for “jurisdictional purposes” meaning they wanted to find a fitting jurisdiction to charge Hotz in, but why do you need the personal information of everyone who accessed his website, watched his videos, or commented on his blog to find out where to charge him? The two settled out of court in April 2011, but that certainly didn’t stop the wrath of the internet. Members of Anonymous (groups of computer hackers who work under a single umbrella name) managed to hack into Sony’s PlayStation Network servers and ran off with millions of people’s personal information. Sony and Hotz settled, but the damage was done.
Another example is our good friend, the RIAA. In the 2000s, they were determined to shut down anyone who was sharing music online illegally, so they went on a megalomaniac rein of terror threatening their targets with lawsuits or even straight up suing them. Now, who are these dastardly cybercriminal terrorists that they dared to commit the heinous crime of sharing MP3 files? If you said "shady characters wearing hoodies with their laptop" or "full fledged bootlegging operations by foreign nations", then you are wrong. Their targets ended up including college students, single mothers, and even children. Many of said targets weren't even aware that it was illegal to do it, so the RIAA chose to use this as an opportunity to make an example out of people who dared to cut into their profits.
However, the tyrants of the RIAA offered an option of mercy. You could avoid being their next meal if you just doxxed yourself to them, deleted all the music you illegally downloaded, and signed a document saying you were very sorry and that you will never do it again. Of course, you need to read the fine print to find out that this only applies to people who weren't already getting sued or weren't being investigated already and even then they wouldn't be able to guarantee that you wouldn't get sued, just that they themselves won't do it. Furthermore, they offered an "early settlement" (read: extortion) program to those who were probably getting sued/investigated. The way it would work is your university or your ISP would forward extortionary letters based on customers' IP address and send you a letter demanding you to pay them a discounted settlement now (the average settlement was around $3,000) through a website online or else you would get your ass sued. With that option of "mercy" came an equally potent option of extreme ruthlessness. If you tried to fight them, you could have found yourself liable in a court of law for $222,000 (~$342,407.12 today) in damages because you shared 24 songs on Kazaa.
I could list off so many more examples including the anti-circumvention sections of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (an entire section dedicated to undermining the rights of ownership), the arbitration clauses Disney tried using from a completely different fucking service to avoid being held accountable for the death of a man's wife that was caused by the company's negligence, or the hilarious hypocrisy of arbitration clauses preventing the average Joe from suing companies but not the other way around, but you get my point.
Games that use the SafeDisc DRM no longer work in modern versions of Windows after Microsoft realized how much of a baffling security flaw it actually is and subsequently blocked it starting with Windows 7 and continuing to this day with Windows 11. Games with StarForce completely brick computers running operating systems as new as Windows Vista. Games that rely on CD checks for copy protection purposes are completely unplayable on most modern computers because none of them have CD drives anymore built-in anymore. To combat this, you have a two options: run an unsupported, insecure, and possibly even unstable operating system in a virtual machine/emulator (which would have a decent-sized performance penalty) or just run a pirated version of the game with these checks stripped out of the game or bypassed entirely. Most people (myself included) would just pick the latter. It’s significantly easier to do and it actually uses your computer’s hardware to its full potential. Even Rockstar Games (the company behind classics like Grand Theft Auto) has silently acknowledged this – the Steam releases for games like Manhunt and Midnight Club 2 embarrassingly re-used a crack from a cracking group called Razer 1911, but even then they somehow managed to fuck it up and ruin the experience for the paying customer.
Here’s another bit of an anecdote for you to understand the issue. In 2018, I acquired a legal, boxed copy of the original Call of Duty from 2003 whilst on a trip to Utah. After we got home, I attempted to install it onto my computer of the time which ran Windows 7 and by all accounts should have worked fine, yet it didn’t. The SafeDisc DRM the game with kept it from launching because Windows was blocking its attempts to verify that my game was legitimate. With Windows 7 and 8, I could have run something in the command prompt to temporarily disable this since the components it relied on were just disabled by default, but in Windows 10 and newer since those components were apparently outright removed. I had to download a crack for the game just to be able to enjoy the game that I legally owned without potentially opening myself up to additional security flaws caused by outdated and unsupported DRM.
In my personal opinion, I don’t think so. With physical media, it’s more expensive and it does take a little longer for you to be able to use it, but it is practically impossible for them to take away your access after the fact unless they hire literal burglars to break into your home to steal it back. Furthermore, you can extend the life-cycle of that physical media and the contents on it by decades by simply ripping their contents and saving them on a computer, giving you complete control over your library of movies at home. We’re also no longer in the age in which we have to keep buying new copies of our movies every time a new format became the norm like we did with the shift from cassette tapes to LaserDisc/DVD or cassette tape to CD. Digital media formats have made it not only possible but also incredibly easy to buy something, rip it for long-term storage, and then convert it to any format or resolution we want to be played back whenever and however we please, the very definition of ownership. This is something that just can’t be and will never be accomplished by mainstream streaming services.
Defining ownership
Ownership in my eyes is the concept of being able to purchase a product and being able to do what you want with it privately (with the exception of bootlegging it, obviously) whenever and wherever you want without arbitrary limitations placed on you by the product’s manufacturer/seller. In the interest of sustaining unsustainable business models, large media companies of all types have shifted to ensure that such a capability ranges from extremely difficult to achieve to downright impossible by implementing arbitrary restrictions at every level possible.DRM-protected media is problematic
DRM (or digital rights management) is a measure set in place by manufacturers of media formats like floppy disks, CDs, streaming codecs, and more with the goal supposedly being to “protect [their] intellectual property” by preventing you from directly accessing or copying them. In reality, such measures effectively control how you use the media you legally paid for, prevent you from preserving your library of legally owned materials, and in some cases pose a significant risk to the hardware you interact with it because of their intensely proprietary and opaque nature.Internet-connected DRM hurts the consumer experience
Online activation DRM is a concept that was introduced in the 2000s and since then has become a literal pain in the neck for several categories of consumers who play by the rules.Preservationists
Preservationists are a category of consumers who want to preserve not only the software that they use, but also the experience of using it on era-appropriate hardware. DRM that requires a connection to the internet directly affects the experience of this type of consumer in the long-run.Steam is one of the most popular ways to get games for the PC. Despite having a fairly pro-consumer stance in a lot of ways (frequent sales and discounts, supporting the Linux gaming community, fairly lenient and hands-off anti-cheat), you cannot play games you own on it without first logging in with your account. While this isn’t a problems for those who are running the latest and greatest hardware and software, this becomes a major problem for those who want to experience older games as they were on era-appropriate computers because the software that carries the DRM itself no longer supports anything older than Windows 10. Since said computers most likely can’t comfortably run those newer versions of Windows, they are effectively unable to play the games they bought ages ago because their computer, once perfectly capable of playing the game, isn’t supported anymore. Even those who got the boxed copies of some games have to install and run Steam, which means that those who got the physical copies of games still can’t play them even though their hardware should and would run the game without any problems.
Casuals
Some game publishers like to be extra painful by making their copy protection so anti-consumer that even the average player will be inconvenienced by it in some capacity. Some have made it so that even if you get the game on a more pro-consumer platform like Steam, you will need to install a completely difference piece of DRM-riddled software and create an account on their platform just to play it. Others have added arbitrary restrictions like limiting how many computers your copy can be installed on or required that you have an internet connection to even play the singleplayer part of the game.Fallout 3 was released for the PC in 2008 and, even in the Steam release, came bundled with the truly terrible Games for Windows LIVE – Microsoft’s own attempt at making the next Steam. Even after that service was discontinued in 2013, you still needed to install it just to play the game. This became extremely difficult because at some point Microsoft decided to nuke GFWL entirely from their downloads, making it impossible to actually install and play the game without either having to dig through the depths of Google to find an installer that worked or using a mod that completely removes it (in other words, a crack). Meanwhile, the pirates had a crack out within hours of the game’s original release and were enjoying the game free of any account requirements. Only in the year 2021 did Bethesda finally decide to actually remove the game’s completely unnecessary dependency on the long since dead service, which was done with an update.
In 2013, EA released a game for the PC and Mac that attempted to reboot the long-dormant SimCity franchise. The horrific launch caused by the completely unnecessary DRM is what killed it – in order to play the game, you needed an internet connection at all times and the ability to actually connect to EA’s authentication servers. On launch, consumers were unable to play the game they paid $60 for even in singleplayer because the servers they needed to connect to were constantly overloaded and unable to handle the stress of people actually wanting to play their game. Worse yet, even if you did manage to connect to their servers, you were literally put in a waitlist just to start the fucking game. As you can imagine, those who reviewed the game on platforms like Amazon were pretty unhappy about this. Within 3 months of this disaster of a launch, a crack was released which let you to actually play the game offline. It took an entire year for EA to release an patch that would achieve the same thing.
One of the worst experiences I had – and I am still extremely salty about it – is the time I dared to play the PC version of UNO (published by
Historical hardware/software problems caused by DRM
In some cases, DRM has actually harmed computers belonging to people who legally own the product more than it has actually done its job of protecting intellectual property.In the early 2000s, Sony BMG decided to try curbing music piracy by intentionally crippling the physical media releases of music with so-called XCP copy protection, which required you to install incredibly sketchy pieces of software onto your computer just to play and copy the music on it. Said software hijacked certain parts of Windows under-the-hood in order to obfuscate what in tarnation it was doing (much in the same way that a rootkit does), indirectly caused the computers it was installed on to have reliability issues with system crashes galore, and added a bunch of extra vulnerabilities to your computer that could and would be exploited by viruses to do a bunch of other nasty things to it. Your natural response to such issues would most likely be to try to uninstall it, but that’s where the second kick-in-the-nuts came into play – it intentionally hijacked your computer to prevent you from even finding it to uninstall it. This entire situation was unraveled by an employee at Winternals (later part of Microsoft) who discovered it while testing software intended to detect rootkits and published their findings on their blog. Sony’s response was at first to deny its harmfulness and release a “removal tool” which sucked major donkey balls (it only un-hid the DRM from you, collected your email address for some reason, and installed what was effectively a backdoor in your computer), and then eventually recalled all of the CDs with the stupid protection on it along with releasing a proper removal tool. Of course, the last part only happened after Sony was sued for their tomfuckery.
The issue also applies to games as well. Computer games from the early 2000s often came with different kinds of copy protection which usually required you to insert the game’s CD into your computer. StarForce was used to do this back in those days and was particularly nasty as it nested itself deeply into your computer once installed (it literally installed itself as a system driver and thus had an insane degree of control over your computer) and was claimed to cause system instability when doing things not even related to playing the game. Worse yet, removal was difficult – uninstalling the games that came bundled with the protection didn’t remove the protection itself and so-called “removal tools” that were offered sometimes just didn’t work at all or left behind some remnants. On modern computers, the issue is actually amplified because modern versions of Windows outright refuse to boot if you install a game with this bundled with it. I have had personal experiences with this problem as I once installed an old PC game from ~2005 onto my Windows 10 laptop and was kindly greeted by Windows failing to boot afterwards because StarForce installed itself as a driver. I had to manually remove it using the recovery menu Windows provides just to get my computer to boot again.
Anti-cheat and DRM often aim to achieve the same thing: prevent the end user from tampering with their software. They claim it’s for “your security” or (in the case of the anti-cheats) to “keep things fair”. But what happens when a big company responsible for their tamper protection abuses their intentional opacity to secretly use your computer for their own gain? This actually happened in 2013 when the E-Sports Entertainment Association League (ESEA League) was caught using people’s computers to secretly mine Bitcoin after some more technically-inclined users noticed that the anti-cheat was using a considerable amount of their computer’s resources and looked deeper into the issue. The co-founder of the ESEA League claimed that their secret cryptocurrency mining operation was a feature that they were considering. They settled for $1 million to avoid being criminally prosecuted.
I’d like to stress that these issues affected legitimate consumers who paid actual money and played by the companies’ rules. They went the legal route as intended and still got screwed in the end, while the pirates (the folks who didn’t play by the rules) were able to freely enjoy the media issue-free after a crack inevitably came out for them.
The unfortunate truth about DRM
Despite all the issues they pose to the consumer mentioned above, DRM-protected media has become the norm with services like iTunes (which offered a way to legally obtain DRM-free copies of music if memory serves right) being largely replaced by DRM-infested streaming services like Spotify and Pandora during the 2010s to the 2020s. Offline playback of music (something you used to be able to do and was once the norm back in the day) is now impossible without paying a monthly/weekly subscription, and even when you play by the rules you are still getting an experience objectively inferior to what was once the norm in the early 2000s. Historically, if the contract between the record label and the retailer you got a song from expired, that wouldn’t affect your ability to listen to a song since you already have a copy in some capacity. On Spotify, you simply can’t listen to it anymore. I’ve found that even with playlists as early as 2019, songs in my playlists are grayed out and can’t be listened to anymore.Online streaming is (usually) not actual ownership
When you buy a TV show or movie online on something like Amazon Prime or pay the ever-increasing costs of a subscription service like Hulu or Netflix, you’re not actually paying to own the media in question – you’re paying for what is effectively a long-term rental of it that depends on the well-being of the services hosting it and their contracts in order to function.You usually don’t own the content you buy online
Content purchased on most streaming platforms like Amazon Prime and Google Play directly rely on two things: your ability to connect to the internet and the well-being of the companies hosting the content. Even when they offer “download” features to watch them offline, your ability to use the downloaded content is managed by the DRM that usually needs to at least periodically ping a central server to ask if you’re supposed to be able to use it. If you downloaded an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants you bought on Google Play onto your phone but you can’t access the authentication server for whatever reason, you can’t actually watch it. So, what happens when companies offering these services like Google or Amazon that are considered “too big to fail” do eventually fail or even just discontinue the service altogether because they’re considered not profitable? The end result: the content you paid for is completely unusable and you very likely need to buy it again on another platform.There are some companies that offer compromises which are exceptions. In the music sector, Bandcamp is allows you to stream music but you can buy albums/individual songs that you can legally download later on to DRM-free format. In the games sector, GOG (also known as Good Old Games) is a platform that lets you buy and download games in a matter similar to Steam, however the main difference is that none of the games include DRM when you download them. While these services still rely on the status of the company behind them staying around for the downloading part, once they’re downloaded you can use them whenever, wherever, and however you want (including copying and archiving them). Unfortunately, these platforms are the exception, not the rule.
You definitely don’t own the content you pay a subscription for
Subscription services are a completely different animal entirely. When you pay for a subscription service like Netflix, Xbox Game Pass, or Spotify, you’re effectively paying a monthly rental of pretty much everything in their library that they have access to through contracts. Right from the get-go, you’re relying on four things to be able to access the content you’re paying a subscription to access:- The willingness of an entity holding the rights to the content to continually provide it
In the cases of content that isn’t owned by the company hosting the service, this usually is achieved by the use of a contract which allows the service to stream it to their customers under a series of conditions. The problem with this is that the entity holding the rights in question can and will easily rugpull their contract/content for a variety of reasons (they got a better deal with other services, they’re starting their own competing streaming service, geopolitical issues like economic sanctions literally preventing them from doing business, normal political issues like if the content in question is considered offensive by today’s standards, they don’t consider it economically viable to offer the content anymore).
- Your ability to access the internet
This is self-explanatory. Subscription streaming services need the internet to operate and like I said before, even if they offer a “download” feature it still needs to talk to a server to make sure you’re considered “allowed” to actually access the content that’s on your device. If you’re in the middle of nowhere or the internet went out for your area, this is basically impossible.
- Your devices being up to date and still supported by the service
Your ability to stream movies relies on the device you do it on being supported years from now. While you were once able to stream movies from the Wii, that isn’t possible anymore since the console is no longer supported. Other consoles from that generation such as the Xbox 360 and PlayStation are running on borrowed time now as the companies behind them are winding down their support for the generations-behind consoles. Even outside of the context of game consoles, Roku is killing support for their older streaming boxes and eventually those will become unusable as time goes by (if they haven’t already been so). This is much less of an issue with both pirated and physical media since those will always be able to work together regardless of if the player is still officially supported or not.
- Your own endurance with the company behind the service
Remember when you only needed to pay Netflix $9 a month to get instant access to a massive library of movies, TV shows, and more without mandatory ads or other inconveniences? Look at the state of it now. Its pricing model now includes advertisements, it has a comparatively weak library of shows, you can’t share accounts anymore, and the price of the same experience has increased by at least 172% since then. There comes a point where you as the consumer will ultimately say “this is too much, I’m done paying for it”, which then means you can’t access whatever you did enjoy watching on that service.
Physical media is the closest legal means of ownership
When you buy a Blu-ray disc, a DVD, or a CD, you end up buying a physical copy of the media on them. For many reasons, this is a far superior way of owning a piece of media despite their imperfections.Reliability
With physical media, there’s a lot less that could go wrong enough to prevent you from enjoying a piece of media. Instead of outside factors (e.g. economic, corporate, cultural) beyond your control being the primary reason for something being unavailable, the condition of the medium or even the player itself is what ultimately decides whether or not it’ll work.There is no authentication or other big tech account requirement in place for you to enjoy a movie on Blu-ray. You don’t even need to be connected to the internet to play it. You just plop it in your player and it’ll work. This guarantees that you will still be able to watch Space Jam on Blu-ray no matter where you are, how much society hates you, or how badly decayed society actually is.
Immutability
Contrary to streaming services where the contents could change at any time due to lazy writing in sequels or pressure from outside groups, physical media like Blu-ray or DVD are immutable. The contents are set in stone and will never change. This means that Disney won’t be able to retcon a bunch of garbage into their movies to fit an agenda, that Universal Studios can’t edit an existing scene to make it look prettier , and that Comedy Central who is afraid of threats from extremist terrorists won’t be able to remove a potentially offensive/sensitive scene that mocks a religious leader.Preservability
Physical media is practically the only reliable way of preserving the media you consume since they can’t take it away from you once you buy it. Aside from the fact that you can keep the disc/tape/record and their player forever, you can further expand the lifespan of your library by liberating the contents with external software either on your computer or on your relevant devices.DVDs can be ripped using programs like Handbrake once provided with a file containing the appropriate instructions. Blu-ray discs can be liberated using programs like MakeMKV which will take the contents of the disc and convert it to a royalty-free format without any form of DRM. You can then later on do whatever you want with this freshly-liberated digital copy like converting it to a different format, copying it onto another hard drive, or even playing it on whatever supports it.
Arrr harr, ahoy and avast!
Sailing the seven seas is the most illegal way to get media and has been around for decades. However, despite being intensely illegal (and in some cases risky – we’ll get back to that), it’s sometimes ironically either the best or even the only option.The risks of the Seven Seas
Sailing the seven comes with an immense amount of risks from several different angles. While you can usually get away with it unharmed if you know how to navigate the scene, there’s still the inherent risks of being caught or downloading something nasty by accident.It’ll take the Mayo Clinic to get the lawyers out of your ass
Remember, piracy is still illegal. If you’re consuming excessive amounts of pirated material and the media company in question is having a bad day and feels extra vicious, you’ll want to bring condoms to the courthouse because you might get fucked. If the media company finds out that you’re the source, host, or some other kind of facilitator of some pirated material online, please make sure to prepare a body bag that is around your height and width and offer a mop to the poor soul who has to clean up the mess afterwards.While I doubt that you would get into deep trouble with the law because you shared a copy of Shrek 2 with your friends, casually watched a single movie from 123movies, or downloaded a movie like Oppenheimer for your own personal use, the risk is still there and is a good reason to use a VPN if or when you do decide to sail the seven seas.
Your ISP will chop your balls off if they find out
Internet service providers regularly receive complaints from copyright holders about customers who download pirated content without a VPN and, to avoid getting sued six ways from Sunday, will take these complaints very seriously.If you sail the seven seas and your ISP finds out you’ve been naughty, there’s a good chance they will send you a notice threatening to suspend or terminate whatever services they are providing you if you don’t immediately stop. If you keep doing it and they find out, they will actually go forward with these threats and start messing with your service. If you still keep going despite all this, they will terminate your internet service and you’ll have to find another service provider. While this can be mitigated with a trustworthy VPN, the risk is still there and it is one you should take seriously.
You really want to be careful what you download
The seven seas should be a much safer place than the wild west of Limewire and BitTorrent, but that doesn’t mean you should let your guard down. You should still be very careful about what you download and who you get it from.Downloading pirated content is a lot like having sex with a hooker from the streets of Detroit: if you’re not careful you will catch something truly nasty. You have to remember that you’re downloading from a very seedy part of the internet from websites that have to resort to sketchy advertising agencies just to operate. While the days of downloading MP3s only to be jumpscared by crazy Russian scat porn are long since over, the risk of getting infected with a backdoor that was in something you downloaded from an untrustworthy source will always be there and you will end up paying for it in the long run.
That may sound scary, but if you proceed with extreme caution and use your common sense, you should still be perfectly fine by the end. Examples of good general advice include always checking the file extensions of what you download to make sure that it is what it says it is (e.g. don’t try to open an MP4 file if it has an “EXE” at the end), using an ad blocker, and only going with reputable sources.
The benefits of the Seven Seas
With the risks now laid out on the table, it’s time for us to discuss the benefits of pirated content compared to the more legal means.Universal standards means they work universally
Pirate scenes actually have elaborate and universal standards on how their media should be formatted and encoded. For example, movies and TV shows are encoded with the widely popular MP4/MKV formats and music is encoded with either the FLAC or MP3 formats. Such standards are set by taking several factors into account such as the popularity of the format, the quality of the compression, the quality of the resulting compressed media, the adoption of the format by manufacturers and software developers, and more.As the one who wants to consume pirated content, these universal standards mean a few things to you. For one, the media will have the same format every time which makes playing them back much less of a hassle for those who want to organize them in a particular way. For two, the media itself will work across all kinds of platforms including game consoles, DVD/Blu-ray players, mobile devices, and computers. For three, the universal standard ensures quality control in the pirated content so that things like unnecessary filters or overzealous upscaling, which could ultimately impede your experience, do not happen.
Easy to preserve for years to come
A lack of DRM guarantees longevity, reliability, and portability. With DRM out of the picture, you can count on what you downloaded to work for years to come. You could take a pirated copy of Sony Vegas Pro in the year 2013 and it will still work perfectly on much newer computers in the year 2025. In fact, you can even copy the files directly from the Program Files folder onto another computer and it'll work perfectly.Justifications for sailing the seven seas
Thanks to successful anti-piracy propaganda campaigns by big media companies over several decades (including Don’t Copy That Floppy, You Wouldn’t Steal a Car, Home Taping Is Killing Music, and more), piracy has a stigma painting it as stealing and therefore morally wrong. I personally believe it’s the polar opposite and in some cases, actually justified.The industries want to take away your ability to own what you pay for
Have you noticed that in the past decade or so, a lot of big media companies have pushed streaming platforms, awful subscription services, and DRM-ridden nonsense? Every big industry has been affected by this enshittification in some capacity.The fecal foundation for the software industry was laid in early 2013 when Adobe decided while twiddling their thumbs like a Saturday morning cartoon villain that their paying customers shouldn’t be allowed to pay once for a product and be able to use it forever. So, they came up with the brilliantly terrible scheme of making it so that you are basically required to rope yourself into their Creative Cloud subscription service if you want to have access to the likes Photoshop and Premiere. Instead of being able to pay a hefty upfront cost to be able to run the same piece of software for years to come, you as the consumer are required to constantly give them money every month just to be able to use the program and even after paying thousands of dollars you still lose access to the software you sunk a lot of money into the moment you stop paying for it.
Over the course of the past few decades, the music industry has shifted from physical media releases that will last lifetimes (or even generations) to an internet-reliant, lossy, and inconvenient nightmare. As previously mentioned, you now have to pay a subscription ($12 a month) to be able to listen to music without getting screamed at with annoying advertisements or without an internet connection. In the past, it didn’t matter where you were or if you had an internet connection, you could still listen to music without any problems as long as you had a CD with the MP3s or whatever burned onto them. I can’t listen to a Daft Punk album while I’m in an area with no internet anymore because it requires me to use my smartphone and the DRM in the downloaded music needs to connect to the internet to make sure I’m still subscribed and therefore “entitled” to the music. I’ve noticed that most albums aren’t easily available in a physical form or even in a DRM-free format anymore.
The games industry is a shadow of its former self. Mainstream publishers aren’t even trying to hide the fact that they can’t be bothered to make games you’ll be able to play and experience years from now, let alone ones that don’t suck. A director from Ubisoft (Philippe Tremblay) has been quoted as saying that “gamers are used to […] having and owning their games” and then expressing his belief that such a trend should shift so that we the consumers are more comfortable with not owning the games we pay for. They then tried to bring reassurance by stating “[the consumers] will see that these games will exist, the service will continue, and you'll be able to access them when you feel like.” Really? In an industry that peaked years if not decades ago and is now showing signs of decline across the board, you’re going to have the balls to imply that the service will always be around when your very same company killed off the servers for an old game that came out 10 years ago and made it completely unplayable even offline? Even beyond the blatant contempt for the consumer’s wishes to own the games they pay $60 for and complete disregard for the longevity of their products, the contents of the games themselves have become a sewage silo from all the enshittification. Unique and memorable games have become the exception instead of the rule, with most games now being primarily profit-driven. What was once a one-time $60 payment to have access to everything a game had to offer during its lifecycle (which really encouraged the developers make the game as good as possible instead of half-assing everything) has been infested by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: day-one DLC (which realistically should have just been included into the base game), “season passes”, pay-to-win mechanics that encourage microtransactions, and lootboxes which is just video game gambling. Franchises like Call of Duty (which was once a great franchise that had some incredible stories and innovative gameplay) has devolved into the publisher repeatedly polishing the same turd with mechanics like those noted above thrown into the mix for extra profits. When people try to go back to the older games to try to improve them (or at least make them more safe to play) with mods so that other people who own the game can enjoy them more, they end up getting DMCA’d into oblivion with the excuse of “copyright infringement” just because it cuts into the profits of the latest and greatest generic first person shooter.
If these industries can get you to switch from physical media, they’ll be able to more thoroughly control what you can watch and they’ll be able to hike the prices of their services artificially once they have an excuse to so that you have to pay more for what is effectively less, and given the trend of enshittification that is happening as we speak, I am absolutely certain that they will do this. They claim pirates are the thieves, but then actively do everything they can to steal the definition of ownership from us, the consumers.
Your experience keeps getting worse in the interest of profits
I mentioned in “You definitely don’t own the content you pay a subscription for” that Netflix practically enshittified itself. The reason it did this is because it turns out that after the global pandemic that left people stuck inside their homes was over, profits went down as people stopped paying for their subscriptions. Everyone at Netflix realized how unsustainable a business model that relies on constant growth to survive actually is and to ensure that they continued to profit afterwards, they started going against things they previously promoted and repeatedly hiked the prices for existing customers who want an experience on par with what they had previously.This issue isn’t even exclusive to Netflix. Other services have been taking notes. At the beginning of last year, Amazon Prime Video, once a somewhat expensive but pretty decent service, started shoving ads down your throat and the only way to get rid of them is to pay an extra $3 a month. YouTube, once a wonderful place for people to express themselves, enshittified itself so badly over the course of a few years with increasingly aggressive advertising that using it is now practically unbearable without an ad-blocker and the revenue for the people making videos on it (which is supposed to come from those advertisements) has become an unreliable gamble where they are constantly in fear of being demonetized and have to make sure that their videos are “advertiser-friendly”.
With the state and trajectory of the economy in mind, ask yourself these questions: is it worth having your experience get worse as time goes on because the company behind it needs to appease investors? Is it worth giving increasingly desperate companies more power and more control over your daily life and the content you consume? What are you putting at stake by allowing these companies to control how you access your content? What will these companies do next to ensure they still make a profit?
Big media companies frequently overstep their boundaries
There are many examples of cases in which big media companies stomped their feet in the face of innovation or even tried curb-stomping software with legitimate purposes with the presumption that everyone who uses it is a filthy pirate.We could have had digital audio as early as the 1980s
Instead of having to deal with analog audio cassette tapes for decades, we could have had a digital audio format as early as the 1980s. The DAT (Digital Audio Tape) was exactly this – an audio cassette format that stored music digitally with 1s and 0s instead of with wavelengths. The quality of the music would instead depend on the actual contents of the tape and quality of the player instead of additional factors like the tape’s materials and how the tape was mastered. Despite this, the format failed to catch on. The music industry resisted this innovative format every step of the way.
Industry parasites like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) first lobbied against the format’s introduction and threatened to sue anybody who tried to bring it to the United States. Later on, they also tried to add restrictions to prevent people from recording onto the tapes from mediums like music records, CDs, or even regular audio tapes through legislation. CBS Records tried to introduce a system to detect and prevent recorders from recording from those formats using a notch filter applied to the source, but it really sucked. Despite empty claims and promises that you wouldn’t be able to hear the difference, most people were able to hear it and it was awful. According to some claims, it also didn’t even do its job well.
The format failed, and the masses didn’t get a mainstream digital music format until the CD and its recordable variants went mainstream in the 1990s and early 2000s.
MP3 players and their massive success almost didn’t happen
In September 1998, Diamond Multimedia introduced the Rio PMP300, one of the first portable MP3 players that let you copy songs onto it and play it with you on the go. It was a huge success during the holiday season that followed, but of course the music industry had to stomp their feet and try to stifle yet another massively innovative product because they didn’t try to do anything with copy protection.
The leeches of the RIAA, probably rubbing their nipples like the cable company employees from South Park, sued Diamond Multimedia in the following year claiming that MP3 players enabled people to copy music and thus should be illegal, even though the player in question had absolutely no recording capabilities. The legality of portable MP3 players hinged on this lawsuit, and thankfully for the consumer, Diamond Multimedia won the lawsuit in part thanks to a prior ruling in the Sony vs. Universal Studios lawsuit that happened in the 1980s which made home VCRs legal. This ruling made it clear by and large that MP3 players were legal and in the following years, MP3 players exploded in popularity and quite literally changed how we purchased, consumed, and listened to the music we own.
The RIAA selfishly attempted to take down a popular YouTube video downloader
Like Wile E. Coyote trying to catch the Roadrunner but failing to learn his lesson every time, the RIAA decided that YouTube-DL (an extremely popular public domain piece of software that allows you to download and archive videos from websites like YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, TikTok, and more) was a hotbed for music piracy that needed to be wiped off the surface of the Earth.
They went looking for an excuse to get the project taken down so that they could justify a legal-sounding argument to pull deeply out of their anal cavity like a prostate exam, and they found one – the test scripts the program used at the time to verify that the program worked correctly (a very common practice in the software development industry, mind you) linked to music videos that were on YouTube. Finally, something that they could use to claim that the program’s intention is obviously to steal music (even though it wasn’t). On October 23, 2020, they struck with a vengeance. They wrote up and sent a DMCA request to GitHub, the website hosting the source code for the application, demanding that the program be taken down. GitHub understandably obliged and removed the project entirely.
Artist depiction of the RIAA writing the DMCA letter
Unsurprisingly, the response from the general software community was one of extreme hostility and distaste. YouTube-DL had tons of legitimate use cases including news reporting, archival of content at risk of being deleted, and educational uses (especially during the COVID-19 pandemic where everyone had to stay home even if they didn’t have the best internet), and the RIAA, seemingly completely unaware of concepts like the Streisand effect and the possibility that not everyone who uses archival software is a dirty pirate determined to steal music, decided that nobody should be allowed to download videos because of the off-chance that someone were to download music with it. The Streisand effect almost immediately kicked in massively. The program’s source code was reuploaded on a large scale under new repositories or pull requests to the DMCA repository itself, encoded and posted onto websites like Twitter using images, and more.
On November 16, 2020, a lawyer from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sent an elegantly-written letter to GitHub outlining the functions of YouTube-DL, effectively debunking the RIAA’s claims of the program being used to circumvent any forms of copy protection or that the program encourages copyright infringement, and slam-dunking the RIAA’s attempt to use German court rulings in the context of a U.S. court. GitHub responded to this by putting YouTube-DL back up, rejecting the original DMCA takedown request, and promising to change how they handle similar requests in the future.
They abuse the legal system to get their way
The concept of a legal system is intended to be fair, maintain order, punish people who break the law maliciously and intentionally, and guarantee equal justice and freedoms for everyone. I’ve witnessed multiple examples of big companies abusing this system to punish people who get in the way of their profits even if they’re sharing like 10 MP3 files online or telling people how to jailbreak their own game console.
In early 2010, George Hotz (a renowned software engineer previously known for hacking the iPhone) managed to hack his PlayStation 3 and subsequently published his findings on his website. Sony entered a game of whack-a-mole with Hotz. In an update, they completely removed the component Hotz was using (known as OtherOS), which ended up pissing a lot of people who were using their console as a Linux box (which was something that Sony was completely fine with and even supported!). This led to a dedicated effort by different groups of very smart people to hack the console again and shatter its security, culminating in a presentation given by fail0verflow in which they reveal a way to reverse engineer the console to get the keys that the system used to ensure that a piece of software is legitimate. This was found through reverse engineering efforts and not through any form of illegal measures. They didn’t reveal the key themselves, but Hotz did on his website in January 2011 (along with download links to tools that allow you to hack your own console) while stressing that he does not condone piracy. As a show of good faith, he added a piece of code to his hacking tools that would prevent people from playing pirated games.
Sony didn’t care about his good faith effort, and sued him anyways along with members of fail0verflow claiming that they facilitated copyright infringement. Although somewhat understandable, Sony then decided to kick the hornet’s nest: they turned their attention to the people accessing and supporting George’s work and deemed them to be dirty pirate criminals too. They sent subpoenas to companies like Google (responsible for hosting Hotz’s blog in regards to hacking the PlayStation 3), Bluehost (responsible for hosting Hotz’s website), and YouTube, demanding information about people who accessed, downloaded, or interacted with anything made by Hotz in relation to the PlayStation 3. In other words, if you downloaded tools by Hotz or even commented on his blog or YouTube videos, Sony wanted your information. They claimed that this was strictly for “jurisdictional purposes” meaning they wanted to find a fitting jurisdiction to charge Hotz in, but why do you need the personal information of everyone who accessed his website, watched his videos, or commented on his blog to find out where to charge him? The two settled out of court in April 2011, but that certainly didn’t stop the wrath of the internet. Members of Anonymous (groups of computer hackers who work under a single umbrella name) managed to hack into Sony’s PlayStation Network servers and ran off with millions of people’s personal information. Sony and Hotz settled, but the damage was done.
Another example is our good friend, the RIAA. In the 2000s, they were determined to shut down anyone who was sharing music online illegally, so they went on a megalomaniac rein of terror threatening their targets with lawsuits or even straight up suing them. Now, who are these dastardly cybercriminal terrorists that they dared to commit the heinous crime of sharing MP3 files? If you said "shady characters wearing hoodies with their laptop" or "full fledged bootlegging operations by foreign nations", then you are wrong. Their targets ended up including college students, single mothers, and even children. Many of said targets weren't even aware that it was illegal to do it, so the RIAA chose to use this as an opportunity to make an example out of people who dared to cut into their profits.
However, the tyrants of the RIAA offered an option of mercy. You could avoid being their next meal if you just doxxed yourself to them, deleted all the music you illegally downloaded, and signed a document saying you were very sorry and that you will never do it again. Of course, you need to read the fine print to find out that this only applies to people who weren't already getting sued or weren't being investigated already and even then they wouldn't be able to guarantee that you wouldn't get sued, just that they themselves won't do it. Furthermore, they offered an "early settlement" (read: extortion) program to those who were probably getting sued/investigated. The way it would work is your university or your ISP would forward extortionary letters based on customers' IP address and send you a letter demanding you to pay them a discounted settlement now (the average settlement was around $3,000) through a website online or else you would get your ass sued. With that option of "mercy" came an equally potent option of extreme ruthlessness. If you tried to fight them, you could have found yourself liable in a court of law for $222,000 (~$342,407.12 today) in damages because you shared 24 songs on Kazaa.
I could list off so many more examples including the anti-circumvention sections of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (an entire section dedicated to undermining the rights of ownership), the arbitration clauses Disney tried using from a completely different fucking service to avoid being held accountable for the death of a man's wife that was caused by the company's negligence, or the hilarious hypocrisy of arbitration clauses preventing the average Joe from suing companies but not the other way around, but you get my point.
It’s necessary for older games to run
It is actually sometimes genuinely necessary for you to use a pirated version of a game if the DRM in it relies on technologies or services that either don’t exist anymore or are completely unsupported in the modern age.Games that use the SafeDisc DRM no longer work in modern versions of Windows after Microsoft realized how much of a baffling security flaw it actually is and subsequently blocked it starting with Windows 7 and continuing to this day with Windows 11. Games with StarForce completely brick computers running operating systems as new as Windows Vista. Games that rely on CD checks for copy protection purposes are completely unplayable on most modern computers because none of them have CD drives anymore built-in anymore. To combat this, you have a two options: run an unsupported, insecure, and possibly even unstable operating system in a virtual machine/emulator (which would have a decent-sized performance penalty) or just run a pirated version of the game with these checks stripped out of the game or bypassed entirely. Most people (myself included) would just pick the latter. It’s significantly easier to do and it actually uses your computer’s hardware to its full potential. Even Rockstar Games (the company behind classics like Grand Theft Auto) has silently acknowledged this – the Steam releases for games like Manhunt and Midnight Club 2 embarrassingly re-used a crack from a cracking group called Razer 1911, but even then they somehow managed to fuck it up and ruin the experience for the paying customer.
Here’s another bit of an anecdote for you to understand the issue. In 2018, I acquired a legal, boxed copy of the original Call of Duty from 2003 whilst on a trip to Utah. After we got home, I attempted to install it onto my computer of the time which ran Windows 7 and by all accounts should have worked fine, yet it didn’t. The SafeDisc DRM the game with kept it from launching because Windows was blocking its attempts to verify that my game was legitimate. With Windows 7 and 8, I could have run something in the command prompt to temporarily disable this since the components it relied on were just disabled by default, but in Windows 10 and newer since those components were apparently outright removed. I had to download a crack for the game just to be able to enjoy the game that I legally owned without potentially opening myself up to additional security flaws caused by outdated and unsupported DRM.
Conclusion
I’d like you to take the information I’ve presented in mind and re-evaluate the benefits and deficits that come with how we currently consume media like music, movies, and TV shows. Is it worth paying for multiple subscription services at once in a vein similar to cable companies just to get access to content where you have no control over what is and isn’t available? Is it worth suddenly being unable to watch something you paid for because a contract between the service and the rights-holder expired? Is it worth being unable to watch something because the internet went out?In my personal opinion, I don’t think so. With physical media, it’s more expensive and it does take a little longer for you to be able to use it, but it is practically impossible for them to take away your access after the fact unless they hire literal burglars to break into your home to steal it back. Furthermore, you can extend the life-cycle of that physical media and the contents on it by decades by simply ripping their contents and saving them on a computer, giving you complete control over your library of movies at home. We’re also no longer in the age in which we have to keep buying new copies of our movies every time a new format became the norm like we did with the shift from cassette tapes to LaserDisc/DVD or cassette tape to CD. Digital media formats have made it not only possible but also incredibly easy to buy something, rip it for long-term storage, and then convert it to any format or resolution we want to be played back whenever and however we please, the very definition of ownership. This is something that just can’t be and will never be accomplished by mainstream streaming services.
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