Pre-DMCA: The golden age of piracy, no one worried about anything. Music piracy was common, video files were way to large to bother with.
Post-DMCA: Possible prosecution from big copyright, but also hard to track individuals down, so not a lot of worry, but a lot of angst about it.
iTunes Music Store: Did more to end music piracy than any legal action. Cheap enough and easy enough that a lot of people stopped bothering. Pirate Bay for video, expect multi-day or week downloads.
Torrent tracking/poisoning and ISP consolidation: More prosecutions against small pirates put more of a damper on it.
Cheap Streaming: Did to everything what iTMS did to music piracy
Expensive Streaming: Now. Bringing back pirates, but people are more cautious due to 4.
Here in Sweden the launch of Spotify was the step that basically killed music piracy overnight. They even had the creator of uTorrent working on building the service, interestingly enough. I believe I downloaded my last song the day before I got a closed beta account.
The Piracy Eras:
Here in Sweden the launch of Spotify was the step that basically killed music piracy overnight. They even had the creator of uTorrent working on building the service, interestingly enough. I believe I downloaded my last song the day before I got a closed beta account.
Nice summary! Thanks for explaining!
Thanks! I figure all this grey in my beard should be good for something.