Piracy has become a necessity

What a concept, right? I didn't think it would come to this, but here we are. I know there have been countless amounts of people who have talked about this, especially through various Tumblr posts that I have seen recently, but our capitalist landscape in entertainment media has gotten so bad that we HAVE to turn to piracy for the sake of media preservation.

The main reason why this is the case is because the corporations that distribute entertainment media have only cared about two things: control & money. These goals go hand in hand because, without control over the piece of media, the company that owns the rights cannot profit from it. If a company suspects that a piece of media is making them lose profit due to piracy, it will do everything in its power to seize control and squash any pirating avenues.

However, at the same time, these companies are making their entertainment media harder to access these days, especially on digital spaces. Whether a video game gets delisted for an expired license (or for a tax write-off), or a movie gets taken off a streaming platform on a whim, or a TV show gets canceled without a DVD release, it's never been harder to retain access to the media you know and love. I have always said that if it's difficult for people to access a piece of media, they WILL turn to piracy.

Music, for example, generally doesn’t have this problem because it's easy to access thanks to the advent of music streaming services and online radio stations (Spotify is not good for artists, however). To be fair, it’s probably like this because of that whole Napster debacle around 2000 to 2001. If you want to buy an individual song as an audio file, then iTunes is (kind of) still a thing, despite Apple pivoting towards music streaming through Apple Music. There's also Bandcamp and Amazon Music if you still wanna (legally) obtain music files for offline listening. The only times that I’ll consider pirating music is because the album is either region-locked, it's not globally released, or its album is prohibitively expensive. In any other case, iTunes and Bandcamp have got me covered.

But the same cannot be said for video games, movies, and TV shows. While streaming services have already been taking movies & shows out of rotation because of licensing rights, sometimes they're taken off out of nowhere for no good reason. Sometimes, a movie may not even see the light of day! There's a long history of companies that can and will destroy media when given the chance.

Video games have also suffered from poor preservation right from the beginning. As console generations move on to higher-quality hardware, the old tech often gets left in the dust. Sure, game publishers can re-release the old games on newer hardware, but it won’t be the same. Porting or enhancing a game will inherently change the gameplay experience, for better or worse. In the best-case scenario, a ported/remade game will effectively be the same as the original, if not better. In the worst-case scenario, the port/remake will be so bad that you're better off just pirating the original version of the game.

So, in the case of visual media like movies, TV shows, and video games, I AM going to look into pirating methods because I have lost my trust in the companies that distribute them. It makes me feel like I'm a scavenger in the benthic zone of the ocean, feasting on the fallen carcass of a dead whale. But it doesn't have to be this way, though, especially if a game can stand to stay in operation to this day. Instead of having games confined to old hardware and crappy subscription services, we could have continued full backward compatibility support & officially supported game emulation that's accessible (and NOT sticking it under any sort of Disney Vault nonsense…like Super Mario 3D All-Stars).

That being said, if you see my mermsona wearing pirate gear, it's not just a fashion statement, but also a statement of my beliefs on media preservation. Until the entertainment distributors make it easy to access old media for eternity, I will keep pirating stuff because of access problems, not out of malice, but out of necessity.