The more I think about it the more I believe that we are reaching the end of mainstream piracy in short amount of time:
Paid Research Papers
This type of piracy suffered it’s downfall with the downfall of Sci-hub and it’s looking like it will never recover. But I don’t feel that this is a loss as there is a lot of open access journals and after hearing about MIT decision to stop using Elsevier, I hope that most universities will support the open access journals and leave the paid ones.
Games
Needless to say that it’s getting harder for pirated games crackers to bypass DRM and I expect it to to get worse in the following years and I also expect a lot of game studios to release their games under freemium model with a lot of DLCs and micro transactions.
In general currently there is a good amount of games which did not get pirated yet.
Movies
I am kind of optimistic about the distribution and hope that more pirated movies distributors (Websites, Social media pages/groups/channels, …Etc) will come up, but in my opinion I think that most services will be shut down within 5-8 years, but old movies will be forgotten, so if you looked for a movie from more than one year old you will not find it, hopefully the torrent piracy community stays alive.
I think new services like Tubi might begin to improve in quality and quantity to fulfill the needs of the people who don’t want to pay for streaming.
Music
I kind of think that this is the only type of piracy that will kind of exist till the end of times.
Books
I am scared that it will end/become hard to find within 2 years, I hope I am wrong, but I am very pessimistic about this due to the lawsuits involving libgen, Anna Archive and even internet archive.
Applications
Currently the applications that are worth pirating are few and are usually worth thousands of dollars.
With the exception of Accounting/ERP software, I think that most companies fight piracy softly without really killing it because it’s basically a free marketing to their software.
Android Apps
I think it will go on for 1-3 years and then it will slowly die as companies are making it harder to mod their apps and Google is slowly making it harder on some apps to be modded (as per some of the Android apps modders).
News articles
Almost all the ways to bypass news paywalls are currently ineffective.
Most news sources currently are free to read, so the downfall of piracy of news articles is a good thing in my opinion as it was really free marketing for the paywalled news articles, I think people need to start ignoring paid news websites and to instead to donate to non-profit news sources.
Porn
I think that it will have a mediocre 2-4 years before all the websites turn into pornhub clones, especially with what is happening with goodporn, that will scare all the other websites into compliance to not lose their sites and especially since the number of websites which is holding the porn piracy scene is relatively small.
I think we are truly are experiencing the ultimate downfall of piracy.
Quick Note: before anyone say that Torrent cannot be stopped, that is correct but sadly the torrents search engines/indexes can be taken down. So even torrent is not immune.
No; Piracy won’t stop.
Analog loopholes still exist; and cannot be eliminated completely from the chain. Enterprising crackers will tinker and find weaknesses in systems. People will find bypasses, workarounds, and straight up just crack whole encryption schemes that were badly implemented.
Encryption was never intended to protect content. It was intended to protect people. In the short term; sure, DRM and encryption can protect profits. In the long term, it provably cannot and does not. Oftentimes it gets cracked or goes offline; and the costs associated with keeping authentication servers up for long enough to keep lawsuits off your back is provably large and difficult to scale. I would even assert that it costs more to run DRM than it saves anyone in ‘missed profits’.
Frequently companies also argue that it saves profits by recapturing “lost sales”; but that’s provably false. A consumer, deprived of any other viable choice, will in fact, just not buy the thing if they cannot buy it for what they deem as a fair price. It has also been proven; that if they can acquire the content freely; they will oftentimes become far more willing to buy whatever they acquired or even buy future titles. When a customer trusts; they may decide to purchase. But why should a customer trust a company that does not trust them?