Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

IMO it's important for pirates to stay up to date about things like DNS blocks etc so we can develop or implement workarounds as needed. For every story about some issue, the community will usually find a workaround pretty quickly. As you would have read recently, several of the major DNS players like Cloudflare, Google and Quad9 have all started enforcing court ordered DNS blocks on certain pirate streaming sites and indexers, because of repeated court cases against them by copyright holders and industry bodies.

But we already have good workarounds for this, e.g., spinning up a docker container with pihole-unbound or similar for access to root DNS servers, bypassing the need for downstream DNS providers like Cloudflare. A big part of the value of this community is that (almost) every time a problem crops up, someone will be able to suggest a fix, and often there's already something available. Just use YouTube's campaign against ad blockers as an example. ublock Origin and FreeTube (for example) usually release patches within hours or at most a day or two after each new crackdown attempt by Google.

Maybe we don't do a good enough job of showcasing this, but piracy is alive and well in 2024. Torrents have been around for decades at this point and are still going strong. Same for Usenet. Pirate streaming sites are comparatively easy pickings for law enforcement, but that's more of a game of whack-a-mole than anything else, as a new site will always turn up to replace whatever gets shut down.

So yes, there's been a lot of shutdowns lately but it has barely affected the availability of pirated content overall. And with constantly improving tooling, like with the *arr stack of applications, piracy can now be automated and in many ways (i.e. functionality, not just pricing) provides a much better experience than most paid streaming services provide.