I believe we’re approaching the final 3-5 years of prevalent piracy for several reasons:
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Software: The difficulty of cracking and modifying software has significantly increased.
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Movies and TV Shows: Numerous streaming sites have been shut down or faced legal penalties.
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Adult Content: New releases are often removed within 1-5 weeks, and many older titles are no longer available on piracy platforms.
Given these trends, what might a post-piracy world entail?
OP’s question is “given the above arbitrary and largely unfounded claims, how would a post-piracy world look?” which is… not straight. It’s not just based on anecdotal premises, it also demands answers that don’t call those into question.
OP’s premises may be not wrong on the first point, is in need of some realignment on the second, and I have no idea about the third.
The idea of a post-piracy world can still be envisioned and discussed; will it be full of FOSS and CC-BY-SA? Will it leaves us with only secondhand pulp comics while our roku devices blast 23h out of 24 of ads? Who knows?
Sure. But I’d drop the premises for that discussion. A post-privacy world is probably where convenience trumps everything. Everything is commercialized even more. Access to the internet isn’t free any more, options like selfhosting or uploading things are heavily restricted and each and every service requires you to show your ID card into the webcam and give them your phone number. All private is being sold and AI shows you ADs and propaganda like in the old scifi movies.
I mean we’re already half-way there. And I think it’s especially bad that all the people use closed services that require me to dox myself and give them my phone number if I want to participate. It’s just that we still have alternatives. It now needs politics to cut down access to the internet so only the big companies can host platforms and then force them to stop piracy. And cut the free flow of information and connections to other countries with other legislation. Reasons could be to protect intellectual property, stop crime (also like in the old dystopian movies) or “would somebody please think of the children”… These attempts to take away freedom happen regularly in politics. I think a post-privacy world would simultaneously be one without freedom. Either a scifi dystopia, a Cory Doctorow novel or like in the countries where they currently filter the internet successfully, which aren’t democratic countries.
I think I’m far more concerned with the loss of any privacy or freedom in such scenarios. Not being able to pirate things would be a minor inconvenience in such hypothetical worlds.
I strongly doubt that it’ll happen out of the reasons OP gave. They’re all technical in nature. And in the past we were always able to circumvent the technical ones. Countermeasures have also improved. I don’t see a reason why it’s different now. But I think society could change and affect this. And there are anti-democratic things happening currently…
You wonderfully deviated this conversation towards the real threats we are facing in the near future, and right now. That was very well said, thank you.