Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day — that wonderfully ridiculous holiday born out of a racquetball match in the mid-90s and later popularized by Dave Barry’s column. For most people, it’s a once-a-year excuse to growl “Arrr!” and make a joke about parrots at the office.
For me, though, it always raises a different association: piracy in the digital sense. And this year, more than ever, it struck me just how deeply corporations themselves have recreated the conditions for piracy to thrive again.
The Streaming Golden Age That Wasn’t
Think back to the early 2010s or so. For a brief moment, Netflix felt like magic. In 2011, for just €7.99 a month, you had instant access to thousands of films and shows on almost any device you owned. No hunting through dark corners of the internet, no sketchy downloads—just value, simple and justifiable.
And it worked. Piracy rates plummeted. By mid-2011, Netflix traffic in North America had already overtaken BitTorrent. What that proved —conclusively— is that piracy was never about people being inherently dishonest. It was about convenience and fairness. When given an affordable, high-quality option, people overwhelmingly preferred to pay for peace of mind and the smooth experience.
It could have stayed that way. Maybe two or three services in friendly competition. A cultural commons that was both profitable and accessible. Instead, every major media company looked at Netflix’s success and thought: “Why them, not us?”
And so began the fragmentation.
The Great Fragmentation
Disney, Warner, Paramount, Apple, Amazon, Sky, RTL — all built their own “exclusive” platforms. Each saw streaming not as a shared ecosystem but as a fortress to be defended with exclusive content and licensing walls. The result? A hydra of subscription services.
For you and me, this means the same series your friends recommend might be scattered across five different services, each with their own pricing tiers, apps, and fine-print conditions. To keep up with the “big six” alone, European households now face an annual bill upwards of €1,300 — and that doesn’t even capture niche services. It’s hardly surprising half of consumers report “subscription fatigue.” Culture fragmented into little cubbyholes, locked away behind velvet ropes.
And fragmentation was just the beginning. Once the walls were built, the corporations started squeezing.
The Greed Playbook
After dividing the market, streaming platforms began reaching for the real prize: extraction.
Prices rose sharply. Netflix Premium in Europe jumped from €10.99 in 2017 to around €17.99 by 2022, with Disney+ following suit, hiking its price from €6.99 at launch in 2020 to €11.99 for ad-free viewing in 2024. These rises often far outpaced inflation, gradually transforming “affordable entertainment” into a luxury stack with a four-digit annual price tag.
Sharing — which used to be part of the appeal — was criminalized. In 2023 Netflix began cracking down on password sharing, framing it as lost revenue. Disney+ quickly followed in 2024. Suddenly, grandparents living in a different household or siblings away at university became revenue leaks needing to be cut off. Customers who thought of family as… well, family, were now told they were stealing.
And then came ads. Not on “free with ads” tiers, but on paid subscriptions. Paying €12 a month and still being forced to sit through ads is less innovation and more insult. Platforms sold us convenience, then turned around to degrade it once enough of us were hooked.
Finally, perhaps the most egregious violation: content deletion. Sony attempted to strip over 1,300 seasons of Discovery shows, including Mythbusters, from PlayStation users who had already paid for digital access. The outcry was intense enough to force a reversal, but the precedent was clear. Our purchases aren’t purchases at all—they’re licenses at the mercy of corporate whim.
Buying is renting. Ownership is an illusion.
Pirates Return
Faced with these conditions, people responded the only way people ever do when systems become exploitative: they routed around them. Piracy surged again. Global visits to piracy sites rose from 130 billion in 2020 to 216 billion by 2024 — an increase that no amount of “educational campaigns” about morality can explain away.
Piracy today doesn’t thrive because people suddenly became less ethical. It thrives because, ironically, it once again offers the superior service:
- Everything is in one place
- It costs nothing, versus €1,300+ a year
- Files don’t vanish when some licensing contract expires
- No ads, no regional restrictions, no arbitrary quality caps
In fact, in many ways piracy has become an inadvertent global archive. Old series, obscure films, niche cultural products that platforms delete to save money — what survives often does so because pirates kept it alive. They’ve become digital librarians, preserving our culture in defiance of corporate amnesia.
If Buying Isn’t Owning, Piracy Isn’t Stealing
When Sony defended its move by claiming users only purchased “temporary licenses,” it exposed a truth it would rather keep hidden: we don’t own what we buy. And if we don’t own it, piracy stops being theft. It becomes parity.
At that point, piracy feels far less like freeloading and far more like civil disobedience. Copying media is reframed as preservation, as resistance, as saying:
“I won’t let you erase history because it doesn’t fit into this quarter’s balance sheet.” “I won’t accept a system where spending €1,400 a year still doesn’t guarantee cultural access.” “I refuse to pay for the privilege of being treated like a revenue leak.”
When the legal market denies rights, parallel systems emerge. They might call it theft. But increasingly, it looks like moral obligation.
The Gaming Parallel
The gaming world illustrates the exact same split in philosophy. Western AAA publishers have turned to microtransactions, loot boxes, and aggressive monetization. The results are layoffs, closures, and disillusioned players. Compare that with independents: indie games grew explosively, claiming 48% of Steam’s revenue in 2024 compared to 31% only a year earlier. Why? Because people recognized fair value when they saw it.
Meanwhile, Asia, and especially China, is experiencing a boom. Tencent and NetEase dominate at scale, while developers like miHoYo (Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail) build global hits. They combine world-class quality with player engagement models that—while not free of monetization — at least deliver sustained value and strong community ties. Five out of eight major Japanese studios hit all-time share price highs in 2024; Chinese developers are riding a similar wave. It isn’t that gamers hate paying. They hate being scammed.
Consumers reward respect. They punish exploitation.
A Simpler Path
The solution has never changed since 2011: treat customers with dignity. Give us one or two platforms, fairly priced. Guarantee that our purchases cannot vanish at the whim of a licensing change. Stop stuffing ads into paid tiers. Don’t criminalize families who share accounts.
All of this is technically possible, right now. What’s missing is restraint — the courage to take reasonable profits rather than squeeze until the last drop.
Conclusion
Talk Like a Pirate Day may be silly, but piracy itself is deadly serious. It’s the natural backlash of a broken system. Each price hike, ad-insertion, and “content removal” is another reminder that corporations see culture as disposable and customers as cattle.
We could have had a thriving ecosystem that balanced creator pay with consumer access. Instead, we got a cautionary tale of how greed cannibalizes trust. And so, each time they overreach, another pirate ship sets sail.
If companies won’t preserve our access, maybe it really is our duty to fly the black flag.
Arrr, indeed.
Some references
- “Disney to launch cheaper ad-supported service in UK”; https://www.bbc.com/news/business-66454314
- “Why some streaming companies are leaning into adverts and raising prices”; https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20231101-why-some-streaming-companies-are-leaning-into-adverts-and-raising-prices
- “Disney+ and Hulu to combine content in single app”; https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65553932
- “Netflix extends crackdown on password sharing to more countries”; https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64573517
- “Price hikes, terrible adverts, customer crackdowns: how the joy in streaming TV died”; https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2024/sep/27/price-hikes-terrible-adverts-customer-crackdowns-how-the-joy-in-streaming-tv-died
- “Netflix to raise prices for UK subscribers by up to 20%”; https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/may/30/netflix-to-raise-prices-for-uk-subscribers
- “Sony’s PlayStation Store Pulling Access to Purchased Studiocanal Movies Next Month”; https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/playstation-store-pulling-access-to-purchased-studiocanal-movies-next-month-1235310863/
- “New California law means digital stores can’t imply you’re buying a game when you’re merely licensing it”; https://www.polygon.com/news/457071/new/
- “The state of online piracy and copyright infringement in Europe”; https://www.euipo.europa.eu/en/news/observatory/the-state-of-online-piracy-and-copyright-infringement-in-europe
- “Online Copyright Enforcement, Consumer Behavior, and Market Structure”; https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/document/download/8c04beb9-f022-4e7a-9d41-8ab4d9eab826_en
- “PlayStation is erasing 1,318 seasons of Discovery shows from customer libraries”; https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/playstation-is-erasing-1318-seasons-of-discovery-shows-from-customer-libraries/
- “PlayStation To Delete A Ton Of TV Shows Users Already Paid For”; https://kotaku.com/sony-ps4-ps5-discovery-mythbusters-tv-1851066164
- “PlayStation Is Deleting TV Shows Players Paid For Thanks To Warner Bros.”; https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/12/02/playstation-is-deleting-tv-shows-players-paid-for-thanks-to-warner-bros/
- “Streaming has a consumer and a piracy problem; the answer lies in the music industry”; https://www.alliotts.com/articles/streaming-has-a-consumer-and-a-piracy-problem-the-answer-lies-in-the-music-industry/
- “Media corporations beware, piracy is starting to roar back”; https://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/25391189.media-corporations-beware-piracy-starting-roar-back/
- “Digital Content Piracy: Corporate Responses to Copyright Infringement”; https://michaeledwards.uk/digital-content-piracy-corporate-responses-to-copyright-infringement/