Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I’ve stopped pirating more than a decade ago but streaming and “buying” content is getting worse and worse.

Even when buying physical copies, BD movies have at least one, sometimes two layers of DRM to put up with; AACS and sometimes BD+ on top of that, and even DVDs technically have DRM although that was blown wide open eons ago.

Also, although CDs are DRM-free, for now, there's a 9/10 chance that if you get a new CD album instead of a lossy download through iTunes/Apple Music or wherever or streaming it through Spotify, that it'll be brickwalled to hell; blame Oasis on that one for starting the Loudness Wars, meanwhile if you go to track down an old vinyl album or even a CD pre-1995 or so, it'll likely have been mastered decently; a lot of the time an old vinyl album is mastered better than a new CD album, both because of predating the Loudness Wars by decades typically, and also because a mastering house will have had a 20Hz-20kHz window to work in with vinyl generally.

Now it seems to be done via invite only forums and special rules and quotas.

This isn't really true. Maybe you have that impression because piracy communities tend to be filled with snobs who constantly humble brag about all their private trackers and paid services. You can still find good quality versions of almost everything through public trackers.

You can still download an entire blockbuster from piratebay.

Arr software and Jellyfin make it easier and accessing it convenient, but at the backend, we're all still doing the same shit.

VPN yo ass up and download some movies, choom.

There's still tons of content available on public trackers. Just be sure to use a VPN so you don't get nasty letters from your ISP. It's not hard, just connect to the VPN and bind your torrent client to the VPN interface.

But don’t use the pirate bay…bad place. Other places are much better and have good reputations.

That doesnt make much sense to me either, but more than Torrent Freak