Just last year the Mandalorian became the most pirated TV show of 2019 while Game of Thrones, in previous years, was getting around 100,000 copies of its TV show stolen a day!

Whenever we hear “piracy” we think of pirates stealing treasure and sinking boats. We never think of piracy as a modern problem of people stealing software and copyrighted films.

Piracy ever since it started has been on the rise. In 2010 only $6.7 billion were lost due to piracy but as of 2019 it quadrupled to $31.8 billion. With no signs of this problem slowing it makes you wonder if it will ever max out. 

Researchers predict that in 2022 the amount of money lost from pirating would be $52 billion. 

Recently two illegal streaming sites were shut down, one even being bigger than Netflix itself having 11,000 movies and 13,000 tv shows while Netflix had only 6,755 movies and 530 tv shows. The company, Openload, was making money through paid memberships. The owners were making thousands of dollars off of illegal material.

With piracy on the rise, many companies will find new ways to prevent it, but with prevention, new techniques will come about always flooding the market with illegal videos and tv services.

In 1999 people first started pirating music with Napster, a peer-to-peer website, but now its evolved to sharing videos over the internet.

I know what you’re thinking–who’s going to catch me? Well, maybe no one, but if they do, the penalties can be steep. In the United States the maximum fine for copyright infringement is $150,000 per instance. Do you have 4 episodes of Mandalorian illegally saved to your computer? That could be worth a $600,000 fine. Also, ISPs (Internet Service Providers) have been known to “rat out” their users who are engaging in piracy. The problem is, many users activate a VPN (Virtual Private Network), which makes it harder to get caught.

The best way to stop piracy is to stop buying subscriptions to these websites. The more people who buy and watch videos on illegal streaming services the more the piracy market will strive.