>>12812000If you want to know the future of piracy, look at what happened to fansubbing for anime. This is a microcosm of the wider issues facing piracy, but it died sooner because it was a single medium and a higher-skill specialisation. But it serves as a model for how piracy ends.
For piracy to work, there needs to be dedicated and skilled individuals out there to copy the media and distribute it. It's a given there'll always be willing consoomers but they don't matter.
As streaming services become more ubiquitous and more people use it, fewer people turn to piracy, fewer people develop the skills to do it, those that do don't see the demand for their services. If you're accessing a private tracker you need specialised staff running it. To rip and encode media, you need specialised skills. If you look into these areas, the people doing these things are old. They've been doing it for a long time. The people coming through to replace them become fewer and fewer as streaming becomes the standard and younger generations don't even know what piracy is or care to explore it.
This happened to anime in an accelerated time frame. Once you had streaming services doing subbed simulcasts, there was progressively less demand for fansubbed versions, so fansubbers saw little point continuing for the work commitment and no one had the drive to do what they did, so the practice largely died aside from a few relics. The decay of piracy is far slower but is happening all the same.
