Digital piracy is having a massive impact on various industries. Sites hosting copyrighted content receive billions of visits every year, taking away money from those who’ve put the effort into making those creative works. PPV sporting events lose customers because there are almost always free live streams hosted across the web. Let’s say there’s a big UFC match on. Lots of content creators will have ‘watch along’ live streams in which they don’t show the actual fight, but will provide commentary and answer questions from subscribers who are tuned in. Very often people ask if there’s a link to the fight or some bots/users will spam a bunch of links to suspicious sites claiming to have a free stream.Â
There’s been a debate for many years raging about the justification for piracy. Some people feel that corporations who provide these services take advantage of customers, and so piracy is a way to eat away at the excess profits of greedy executives. Others make the case that it doesn’t matter if companies make excess profits on their creative works. No one is forcing you to pay to watch a movie. But it seems piracy isn’t going away anytime soon. More companies are doing away with one-time license fees for their software and charging monthly subscriptions. Adobe Photoshop, for example, used to be a one-time thing. You’d buy the software, use it as much as you wanted and then pay for a new version several years later (if you wanted).
