It feels like we're probably in, or just over, a local maxima as far as getting content at a reasonable price goes. This has obviously been a reflection of the ease of duplication and acquisition of works for free (gratis) that the internet has brought about.

Now we seem to be entering a time where, as media mega-corps have appeared and won us back to paying for content and having content easily accessible, they're starting to think they can ramp up the prices and lock away "their" content in a silo with a hefty price-tag for entry.

It seems as if we're going to move back towards a much higher price for taking part in the culture that surrounds current media; and that in turn is going to lead to more copyright infringement. Only this time the media corps have got the internet sewn up pretty well

It would be ideal if the reaction were to rest control of culture from the hands of big business a little with some statutory reform. But that in turn rests on whether countries get democratic reform to proportionalise representation and enable the tackling of smaller issues like disenfranchisement from culture and locking away of works so they can't ever enter the public domain.

I used to think this was happening with music, then I realized I completely and accidentally switched to indie distributors.

Examples: any music from “nightvale presents”, and “dark compass” podcasts. DC has an epic best of 2019 as the current episode.

I’ve had mixed luck finding works from those sources on the big streaming services, but I listen to them legally nevertheless.

I have netflix, hulu, hbogo, and prime, and I pirate stuff that's in the catalog right now as there is no guarentee it will stay in the catalog. Netflix in particular lost a ton of content over the years. Ironically, I even get better quality streaming with piracy over legal channels.

IF you're an enthusiast, big media fan. I get that, there's not enough.

For me we've reached a level I'm ok with, but it is very much based on usage.

It's not even being an enthusiast. I'll search netflix for "popular movie I watched on netflix three years ago" and it will be removed from the catalog. I don't pass go, I don't pay amazon $5 or whatever to rent, I pirate the movie.

This is in some ways good for piracy. During the 2000s the MAFIAA was heavily invested in their war on sharing sites and protocols because of how popular they were, but now with streaming taking a substantial chunk of that casual pirate audience theres less profit incentive in pushing a lot of prosecution.

It seems like the courts eventually came around to a more just way of thinking too, for example, they stopped treating the partial uploading of a single song as if the person had stolen the entire value of that song from the publishers.

Agreed. Piracy seems to have filtered into being an enthusiast thing ... or at least that perception has held off the more rabid prosecution of it, mostly.