Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Why expose yourself to legal risk by torrenting media (which involves uploading which is distributing) when you can find sites that stream it for you? Just go to Yandex and look up "blah stream" and you'll find tons of sites streaming whatever you want.

I do this because I've tried to watch movies with online friends but every major streaming service I tried won't let me share my screen and stream. They all break somehow. I'm not sure if it's intentional or what, but it doesn't matter.

Depends if you count OEM licences that came with their device as purchases, which would be the vast majority of people.

The EU contingency for a US attack on Greenland for example is among other steps to suspend all US copyrights recognition and starve the US service industry.

Ignore patents (especially medical), licenses, royalties and such while they're at it.
Ban all travel for any muricans (they should do it anyway 'cos measles) and invite them to leave the EU.
Ignore right to repair.
Nationalize any Big US Tech assets in the EU (datacenters, wharehouses) as well as bank accounts, use them to build EU digital infrastructure.
Discourage usage of US tech (windows,AWS, etc) / encourage use of non-US tech.
Stop using USD for any trading.
Close down all US military presence or lock them in.
Etc

I'm in the EU. I was anti-piracy in the past. It took Trump's threats to our territory for me to stop paying any streaming services and actively engage in piracy. Now the money goes to the seedbox hosts outside the US instead of disney or netflix. I also started using ad-blocker for youtube instead of paying. I don't think this is fair towards the content creators but i just can't bring myself to give the US companies any money unless i absolutely have to. I will keep doing this until the US changes its laws/constitution to disallow someone like Trump from threatening their allies, oh and plus until they apologise and promise not to do it again.
Not only will i not give them money, i will aim to cause them economical harm.

not anymore, I left a few years ago but I still go there to visit family

I am personally betting a lot that this is where it's going (career development-wise, not prediction markets, ugh)

US tech has been absolutely awful and stagnating for awhile. It's one thing to continue to deal with it when it's actually offering good value, but it's not. Between the data sovereignty concerns and tariffs, the EU is positioned to jolt its own tech market if it's ready to take the opportunity, and I think they are.

I'm not sure I'd expect anything big or grand, much like the "year of the Linux desktop" I don't know that there will really be a breaking moment. Just slow building of momentum in that direction. And that's all it really takes, once that momentum takes hold it's not going to start flowing back to Microsoft. These greedy corporations overplayed their hand, they broke the agreements, and now there's really no going back.

So I hope ...