Piracy Isn’t Theft. It’s Failure.
Oct 21, 2025
Access & Fairness
From Napster to Netflix
I turned 40 this year. I’m a millennial; I grew up on the internet.
If you’re my age, you remember Napster and Limewire—the feel of a dorm-room Ethernet cable and a progress bar creeping across your screen.
For a lot of us, piracy wasn’t rebellion—it was convenience engineering in the vacuum left by bad access.
The Red Envelope Revolution
Netflix understood that vacuum.
The red envelopes were our generation’s signal that media could be easy. Point, click, wait a day, watch.
It was a convenience business long before it was a content business—and when it retired those envelopes in 2023, the ending felt both sentimental and inevitable.
The Streaming Breakthrough
In 2008, Netflix made a savvy deal with Starz that let it stream a deep catalog from Disney and Sony—an inexpensive sub-rights arrangement in a world that still undervalued streaming. The price tag was reported around $30 million a year then; by 2011, renewal talk ballooned into hundreds of millions before the deal ultimately collapsed.
But for a window in time, Netflix had library breadth you could feel. That breadth—and the ease of getting to it—is what really bent the curve.
Convenience Beats Free
You could watch the internet’s behavior change in real time:
2011: Netflix = ~22 % of U.S. broadband traffic
2014–2015: ~⅓ of all downstream traffic
Meanwhile: BitTorrent’s share cratered
People didn’t wake up moral; they woke up served.
Netflix kept shipping convenience: autoplay, recommender systems, and brutal-tested reliability.
When free is clunky, easy wins.
“That’s not an ethics argument—it’s an operations argument. Convenience beats free when free is clunky.”
Fragmentation = Piracy’s Comeback
Then the system broke again.
Libraries splintered into exclusives. Prices stacked. Windows shrank.
Now it takes five logins, six bills, and endless dead ends when a show hops platforms or vanishes.
When access fragments, piracy rehydrates.
“We made the system worse—and the internet did what it always does: route around damage.”
Fans, Not Thieves
Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
The heaviest “pirates” are often the heaviest fans and buyers.
UK Ofcom: high illegal consumers also spend the most legally.
Later surveys echoed it—serve them, and they buy.
Delay or block them, and they route.
Even Netflix admits it in filings: piracy is growing and hard to compete against.
“Piracy isn’t the crime that happens to us; it’s the receipt we generate.”
Not Theft—Unserved Demand
I’ve lived both sides.
In college, our crew joked about “rip ’em and ship ’em.”
Many of those same friends now work in production—still fighting to watch and reuse the work they help make.
They weren’t dodging payment. They were dodging friction.
That’s not theft; that’s unserved demand.
The Fix Isn’t Lectures—It’s Infrastructure
“People don’t wake up moral; they wake up served.”
Stuart Diamond calls it getting more: optimize for the durable outcome both sides can accept.
When studios insist on maximum control in every window, territory, and derivative—they maximize the chance of getting nothing.
Or worse, they push audiences to the one place that will give them something instantly.
Rights That Travel
So what does “getting more” look like?
Portable rights metadata that travels with the work
Machine-readable yes/no/price with auditability
Global reality respected: premiere everywhere—or expect the
.torrentfirst
When a viewer wants to watch or a platform wants to license, the answer shouldn’t be “call three lawyers and wait.”
It should be machine-readable yes/no/price with auditability.
That’s not abstract governance—it’s access math:
the shorter the path from want → watch, the less piracy pays.
The Moral Observation
Piracy isn’t a character problem. It’s a systems problem.
When we build pathways that are fast, fair, and portable, piracy recedes—just like it did when one login made everything appear in seconds.
When we fracture access, piracy isn’t the crime that happens to us; it’s the receipt we generate.
Why It Matters to Paychecks
If you work in film or TV, this isn’t theoretical:
Clearance delays stall shows → starve people
Residuals trapped in lost contracts → don’t pay rent
Every time we improve access, we don’t just “compete with free.”
We restore fairness, because money follows the path of least resistance.
Piracy isn’t theft.
It’s failure—of access, of portability, of will.
Let’s fix the system and get more.
