The true % of viewership that is derived from torrents vs paid subscription is not even comparable. Not to mention many people torrent content simply because it’s there and being seeded. Many who torrent content regularly would not otherwise pay for a subscription to view the content, like myself they torrent the content because it’s available and trending. Meaning that one cannot so easily consider it lost revenue, because many of those who downloaded would have simply gone without had a torrent not been available, and not become paying subscribers to any service.
I vowed years ago never to give another dollar to Netflix because of various stances the company has taken over the years on political issues. However not through lack of resources but out of principle alone did I recently seek the series ‘Squid Game’ through torrents rather than give a host company like Netflix a single dollar.
Torrenting has been and remains a sort of middle finger to the “Digital Corporatocracy” that want their real-world monopolies extended to the online world and do their best to limit our ability to freely share 1’s and 0’s with each other, unless it goes through their digital middle-men so that they can collect their fee.
Digital theft as concerning media copied for personal consumption is not comparable to stealing, despite any coherent intellectual-property argument that can be made.
The original vision of the internet was that 1’s and 0’s would be able to be shared between humans without inhibition or limitations. Somehow we allowed capitalism to fragment this system and well, thus this article..
Long live torrents and may they become further decentralized and untraceable.
