Thread: What will piracy look like in 30 years?

I think the war between MPAA, record labels etc and the p2p community will still be strong as ever. Piracy has been around for a long time now, probably for as long as internet has existed, and although it has changed shape and forms (from kazaa and limewire to private trackers and to ddr), there will always be a form of piracy. Maybe the popularity of private trackers will dwindle and take the route of limewire and kazaa, and there will be a new form of piracy available, but piracy will never end that's for sure.

Maybe in 30 years we'll be back on ships and the pirates of the ocean, or we'll be internet pirates, or pirates of the road... no one can really tell Piracy started way before anything before the internet. I think piracy will be more popular than it is today because things will be more expensive. Society will never change and their will always be Pirates.. "Let thee bleed thy flag, Fight for Thy captain and crew".... Captain Blackbeard.. The treasure for us now days is Knowledge we fight til we die... Piracy and P2P, MPAA and RIAA, and Cybercrime and Cybervillians... Piracy will always be here... i dunno but we can wonder... i fought we'd have airships .....


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Given what we are seeing to this date with anti-pircay organizations and copywriter holders I think we can expect it to piracy to become more difficult for the average Joe. I say this because if the slew of new anti-piracy laws being drafted are brought in it will deter the casual and 'inexperienced' pirate, not to mention it would mean it could be easier for them to suffer heavy consequences if they are caught. So having said all that I think piracy will become a little more complicated. I think the more underground world of piracy will become a more popular option-many people whom I know currently do not deem it necessary. What I mean by this is people will switch to more sophisticated means, that may mean private trackers, private channels or perhaps something entirely knew the point is I don't see a future in the world of public trackers and so called 'easy piracy.'

Agreed. public trackers could very well disappear or they could become a lot smaller than because the masses don't use them anymore because cheaper and legal options have risen. Just take a look at the music business or the movie business. Websites like last.fm or spotify or netflix are booming! They are all relatively cheap and they have a huge database of different music and movies that people want.

Off course piracy will allways exist. There are always people who swear to it (like me) but the communities for illegal downloading will be a lot smaller because there are alternatives that are legal.

I don't really think piracy is going to be to big of a deal in 30 years. I think that netflix and spotify are going to be the leading example for future Copyright owners to get their media out to the public. The copy right trolls know that people are getting very tired with them and they can only keep up with the game for a little while longer. Or maybe i'm just crazy and hope for a better world.

Piracy will never go away, it will simply evolve. The days of swapping floppies and CDs are behind us. Piracy is now out in the open and acknowledged publicly. I suspect that in the next 30 years it will likely be driven back underground, but will have a higher rate of participation than we ever saw in the past (pre-napster).

I have been through the whole progression, trying every new technology as it comes along. I started with floppies and 300 baud modems. As things progressed the internet opened up whole new worlds of moving data. Usenet, FTP, HTTP, Kazaa bringing us to the latest method: BitTorrent. Personally I think BitTorrent opened up a new way of thinking about data transfer. There are still top sites using high speed FTP and other transfer methods, and despite the difficulty we still see usenet being a viable path but they both rely on client/server architecture. BT and its peer to peer model of distribution will be with us for a very long time.

The question I am then left to ask is what content will be pirated?

Bill Gates, a number of years ago, first talked about (what has become known as) Software as a Service. See Office 365 as an example of what he meant by that. Microsoft (and most other software companys if they are smart) will move to this model, where you are feed a stream of data to run an app, instead of installing locally. This gives the software vendor a lot of power to combat piracy since they are not handing you a CD or other install medium with a CD key and trusting you will "do the right thing" and not install it on 20 machines in your office. 30 years from now, assuming this model of software delivery takes hold as I expect it to, we will see a lot less software piracy and instead will be focusing more on media like books, music, movies, etc. As an aside, one of the first movies I remember pirating was Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. I spent 4 days downloading that movie (in Mpeg 2 format), This was in 1999, and I was still on a modem. I had been pirating games and apps for over 15 years by that point. Today I would estimate that movies make up probably 40% of my transfer data.

Copyright laws will get more restrictive partly due to the public awareness of piracy. As I mentioned earlier, Piracy used to be underground. We talked about it in hushed tones in the hallways at school and organized "user groups" that were just glorified trading partys at local pizza joints and friends homes. Everything was done with floppys. Once Napster hit the scene, making it incredibly easy for people to download music, Piracy suddenly became a hot topic. The news had segments on it, it was all over the net. Piracy became a house-hold word. Once piracy became mainstream, we started to see new laws, heavier enforcement, albeit ineffective. they will not stop the drug trade, and they will not stop piracy, but for those that do get caught, they will pay larger fines and possibly longer sentences, because laws have been stiffened in an effort to show the public they are Fighting Crime! I suspect that over the long term, this will drive piracy at least somewhat back underground. Private Trackers are a symptom of this shift. No longer can you find a web site openly hosting warez - at least not for long. Trackers have a legal grey area they can hide in but those loopholes will be filled with stricter and harsher laws.

They wont stop Piracy but they will scare away enough of the casual pirates that they can point to a graph on the news and say "See? Our enforcement works!" Meanwhile, people like you and me will continue doing what we have done for decades. We will just be a bit quieter about it. Like it used to be.

I think I'll be pirating patterns for my awesome new 3d multi-material printer.

"I need new shoes. I know, I'll download some (really really retro at that point) adidas superstars and print them out."

I'll be an old man in 30 years.LOL but i am sure there will be some sort of piracy still around if we make it through 2012 . But I also think that by then alot of people will be able to watch newly released media from the comfort of thier homes legally and for a small price. Even the newly releases that come out to theatres will be available. If you look at it in the long run, movie studios will make more money this way. I mean the technology is right in front of us and it's getting more sophisticated. We shall see what happens my friends.

Wonder what the answer to this question was 20 to 30 years ago. Might it be the same answer, who knows. I think its just going to get bigger and bigger. With blurays coming out and all the digital world being able to get onto the internet. New HDD's capables of holding PB's and fiber optic networks. I think it's only going to get better. Did someone say blu-ray in seconds, NICE :D