New research published in the Journal of Cultural Economics documents how the COVID-19 pandemic created a surge in "new pirates". Contrary to simple narratives, increased online piracy during the pandemic isn't always associated with less legal consumption. In fact, the relationship between piracy and legal markets is far from straightforward.

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[–] 01189998819991197253@infosec.pub 68 points 5 days ago (2 children)

No. COVID didn't lead to this. Their insane greed lead to this. We were more than happy to pay a fair price to own a product, but no... they wanted more, and more, and more, and, eventually, we had enough. The fact that it happened during a pandemic is irrelevant, because it didn't lead to this. Their greed lead to this.

[–] bountygiver@lemmy.ml 10 points 4 days ago

This, very likely the whole thing is a correlation as many services used covid as an opportunity to raise prices and deliver less.

[–] skankhunt42@lemmy.ca 11 points 5 days ago (1 children)

When it was just Netflix streaming wasn't so bad but now that everyone and their dog wants to get in on it, it's far to expensive. Greed would cause me to pay $15-25 per streaming service, search for the thing I want to watch and hope its there. If its not on any of them, search where I could try and pay to rent it, and if that fails I... Look for physical on eBay or just not watch it.

Or... My cost per month is about $25 (power, VPN, indexers, Usenet, etc) plus time and hardware to keep my equipment running. To watch something I login to *arr, add what I want, wait a couple minutes, and then start watching it.

[–] bestboyfriendintheworld@sh.itjust.works 8 points 4 days ago

Netflix also got a lot worse and more expensive.