personally, i hardly consume movies/tv shows anymore. if i did, i'd likely pirate them nowadays. I did use netflix when it actually had content through vpn. They removed that (as well as almost all content) which made me terminate that sub. I dont really miss these shows that much, but if i did... i most certainly wouldn't subscribe to several portals jumping between just to figure out where is what and how much time i've got to watch it to the end before they're removing the content again.

i think you gotta realize that at least a lot of people dont really pirate to save money. they pirate because they cant be arsed to deal with the shitty other platform that are plain inferior and take way too much effort to figure out.

wrt books/ebooks: i actually do occasionally buy them on amazon, drm be darned. but i dont actually try to create an archive either. thats the big difference - if you actually wanna keep what you read/watch available forever... you just gotta pirate it. there is no other way. a lot of people enjoy building an archive. they're all forced to pirate almost everything.

> a lot of people enjoy building an archive. they're all forced to pirate almost everything.

Not just enjoy, many times you'd have to if you want to keep your citations and annotations. Otherwise it's the same type of fiascos over and over again

from last year: Microsoft's eBook store: When this closes, your books disappear too https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47810367

Well, the article does describe another way. I’ve been buying ebooks and stripping the DRM for years just so I can have an archive. It sucks, but I feel it’s worth it to support the authors (I recently switched from kindle to kobo, under the impression that this process would be a little improved - but it’s not).

However, for TV and movies, I find the pay site experience to be too poor (last I checked you couldn’t even stream from Amazon video if you run Linux). So I pirate everything.

I think Bandcamp is the perfect site for purchasing music. They’re transparent about what they pay artists and labels, and a purchase nets you unlimited streaming plus DRM-free downloads. This is the model the sellers of these other mediums should be following. I buy a lot of music, all because bandcamp is so great.