The more I think about it the more I believe that we are reaching the end of mainstream piracy in short amount of time:
Paid Research Papers
This type of piracy suffered it's downfall with the downfall of Sci-hub and it's looking like it will never recover. But I don't feel that this is a loss as there is a lot of open access journals and after hearing about MIT decision to stop using Elsevier, I hope that most universities will support the open access journals and leave the paid ones.
Games
Needless to say that it's getting harder for pirated games crackers to bypass DRM and I expect it to to get worse in the following years and I also expect a lot of game studios to release their games under freemium model with a lot of DLCs and micro transactions.
In general currently there is a good amount of games which did not get pirated yet.
Movies
I am kind of optimistic about the distribution and hope that more pirated movies distributors (Websites, Social media pages/groups/channels, ...Etc) will come up, but in my opinion I think that most services will be shut down within 5-8 years, but old movies will be forgotten, so if you looked for a movie from more than one year old you will not find it, hopefully the torrent piracy community stays alive.
I think new services like Tubi might begin to improve in quality and quantity to fulfill the needs of the people who don't want to pay for streaming.
Music
I kind of think that this is the only type of piracy that will kind of exist till the end of times.
Books
I am scared that it will end/become hard to find within 2 years, I hope I am wrong, but I am very pessimistic about this due to the lawsuits involving libgen, Anna Archive and even internet archive.
Applications
Currently the applications that are worth pirating are few and are usually worth thousands of dollars.
With the exception of Accounting/ERP software, I think that most companies fight piracy softly without really killing it because it's basically a free marketing to their software.
Android Apps
I think it will go on for 1-3 years and then it will slowly die as companies are making it harder to mod their apps and Google is slowly making it harder on some apps to be modded (as per some of the Android apps modders).
News articles
Almost all the ways to bypass news paywalls are currently ineffective.
Most news sources currently are free to read, so the downfall of piracy of news articles is a good thing in my opinion as it was really free marketing for the paywalled news articles, I think people need to start ignoring paid news websites and to instead to donate to non-profit news sources.
Porn
I think that it will have a mediocre 2-4 years before all the websites turn into pornhub clones, especially with what is happening with goodporn, that will scare all the other websites into compliance to not lose their sites and especially since the number of websites which is holding the porn piracy scene is relatively small.
I think we are truly are experiencing the ultimate downfall of piracy.
Quick Note: before anyone say that Torrent cannot be stopped, that is correct but sadly the torrents search engines/indexes can be taken down. So even torrent is not immune.
Paid research papers - Maybe, and that'd be kinda nice if it happened.
Games - Nah that'll continue on as it has, some get cracked and some don't, it is what it is.
Movies - No way. Torrents and Usenet have been here for how long now? They'll be around for longer than any other methods. Frankly this applies to everything, but especially movies.
Music - Ironically the only form of piracy I almost did watch die. Nobody was doing it really for a few years there because spotify was "just so convenient" but then they thankfully shit the bed and now it's back in a BIG way.
Books - It'll be another game of whack-a-mole. Those three go down more will pop up (though I hope those three just stay up!) There's also IRC to pirate books from, too, and those have been running for like 30yr.
Applications - This is dangerous as hell, you guys have fun I guess. Imma be over here using FOSS.
Android apps - Not the safest either really, but there are packs of them on private torrent trackers that'll continue for a long while still.
News - Yeah paywalls are a bitch, sometimes you can kill em with UbO, sometimes they've been archived for free on archive, this is honestly the hard one here.
Porn - Fat chance. Idk what you're talking about with the "porn piracy scene being small,” there are so many torrent sites both private and free and of course don't forget Usenet, and even sites dedicated to leaking camgirl footage. Maybe it just seems small because even pirates can be embarrassed about porn lol, but trust me there's plenty!
Sure, indexers can be taken down, like RARBG. So you can share torrent files on slsk (I've downloaded some rarbg torrents from there after rarbg's collapse), or another site can pop up and host them either on the clearnet or on i2p. Torrenting may go somewhere technically speaking, but that "somewhere" isn't "away forever" it's simply "another domain, at worst i2p."
with Crowdstrike and other considerations... M$ already wants to close kernel access to their systems. This will make most DRM ineffective. I think games in specific will become significantly easier to crack in the near future.
Especially as linux handhelds continue to catch on and do their thing.
MS can't close kernel access, that would be anticompetition. EU already ruled it illegal.
IIRC this was in regards to Microsoft wanting to close access to the kernel, while also still wanting to use kernel-level APIs for their security suite - which does come down to anticompetitive practices.
However, if Microsoft were not to offer separate products that used kernel-level APIs then in theory it would not have this same issue, which I assume is how Apple gets away with it. But, I am not a lawyer so its just speculation on my part.
So Windows should make security impossible