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?=