> A lot of "piracy" comes from the people who spend the most money on the content they pirate.

That doesn’t strike me as a valid statistic. Where are you getting that data from?

Simple example: My wife wants to consume certain Austrian/German content in Canada which are not available on any streaming service here. The streaming services there (Germany/Austria) do not support Canada. She was gifted DVDs of them, but that means she can't watch them on her phone or tablet (or laptop without a usb dvd drive that's region coded to Europe). Options are to: - rip the DVDs (done some of her collection, pain in the butt unless you have a specific setup for doing it en-masse. Some shows end up with episodes out of order) - download the shows

And this is when she's lucky enough the show/movie had a DVD release.

Similar problems exist for local content that doesn't exist on streaming sites altogether (bunch of things I grew up watching that I'd like to revisit).

Note that ripping DVDs is still piracy if said DVDs contain DRM[1], at least in the US. I don't know about CA, but I'd imagine it's similar, considering the state of copyright ...

[1] Region locking is a form of DRM, and most DVDs at least used to be region-locked. I don't know if that's still common practice nowadays.

In the US, it's only a legal violation if you try selling it. For personal use, you can rip DVDs.

Granted, the media companies use civil lawsuits to also make it feel illegal.

I think he alludes to "lore" more than statistic. In the CD/DVD age anti-piracy measure like region locks, DRM, but also annoying banners you could not skip would often make consuming the media with a regular CD or DVD player so cumbersome, that you were almost forced into ripping the media onto a hard disk first and consuming the media with VLC or similar.

The inability to just consume media using official device to on rented or purchased disks encouraged ripping, sharing and downloading.

There are in fact studies that show people that pirate tend to spend the most on legal content. See every study listed here for example: https://www.vice.com/en/article/evkmz7/study-again-shows-pir...

> That doesn’t strike me as a valid statistic. Where are you getting that data from?

I'm going to assume they are trying to say in other forms of support like word of mouth marketing, user created content, or purchases in other areas such as video game merchandise for instance?=

Funny thing is that most streaming platforms only have DRM because content owners pressure them. It's expensive and a huge hassle to get right.

While indeed DRM barely contributes in fighting redistribution over Pirate Bay, it does prevent stream sharing. Ie.: the platform saves a lot of CDN bandwidth by forcing that onto torrents.

I think this is not entirely true, because HBO and Netflix have DRM on their own shows.

“Careful who you call the bad guys. A lot of "piracy" comes from the people who spend the most money on the content they pirate.”

This is laughably, obviously false. Don’t let the Reddit bubble of all 300 people who do this, or the 1.2% of Yuzu users who actually dumped their own keys, distort your understanding of reality.

> or the 1.2% of Yuzu users who actually dumped their own keys

As a Nintendo Switch owner, if my console died or I wanted to play Zelda at 4K I would probably not go through the hassle of dumping my own keys and rip the game myself if I can download them on the internet in a more convenient/quick way.

So there is probably a much larger fraction of users that own their games legally but still use emulators.

Also as said somewhere else, the fact some people play pirated games they would probably not even play if they were not available that way is orthogonal to the fact they may still be the highest spenders in games. Same applies to movies/music/shows. People usually have a non infinitely stretchable budget. A lot of piracy is opportunistic but would not transfer in sales if prevented. When I was a teenager/young adult I pirated a lot of stuff to try out. My gaming/movie/CD budget was fixed anyway and I still spent money on them but for the most part I would not have bought more if those things weren't accessibles illegally. Some were either out of reach for my budget (softwares like photoshop or Music DAWs), other were not deemed good enough to pay for them over better records/movies/games.

And it transfers to today: while I have a totally unlimited access to 8, 16-bit and 32-bit console roms, I almost only play to games I have owned and loved at the time.