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32% of All US Adults Watch Pirated Content (torrentfreak.com)
Nearly a third of all US adults admit to having downloaded or streamed pirated movies or TV-shows, a new survey has found. Even though many are aware that watching pirated content is not permitted, a large number of pirates are particularly hard to deter. According to a report from TorrentFreak: This is one of the main conclusions of research conducted by anti-piracy firm Irdeto, which works with prominent clients including Twentieth Century Fox and Starz. Through YouGov, the company conducted a representative survey of over 1,000 respondents which found that 32 percent of all US adults admit to streaming or downloading pirated video content. These self-confessed pirates are interested in a wide variety of video content. TV-shows and movies that still play in theaters are on the top of the list for many, with 24 percent each, but older movies, live sports and Netflix originals are mentioned as well. The data further show that the majority of US adults (69%) know that piracy is illegal. Interestingly, this also means that a large chunk of the population believes that they're doing nothing wrong.
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is it still pirating when there's no possible loss to anyone ? Same question for old music, books, software ...
The answer is yes, although only the rights-holder is able to sue you, and if they aren't around, then you can get away with it.
Under copyright law (this is the way the law is written), not only do you have to pay for actual damages, you also have to pay for theoretical damages. So the copyright holder can say, "We weren't releasing it to increase demand at a later date, when we theoretically would release it. Your piracy robbed us of those theoretical potential profits."
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If you have a decent understanding of Linux, it'll take you about a day to set up an OS instance (mine is built as a virtual-appliance type setup on top of VMware ESXi 6.5 using two Ubuntu Server instances) that has sickrage, rtorrent/rutorrent, couchpotato, and plex all stitched together on top of a ZFS filesystem on public trackers. It will take you longer to do so on private trackers which will allow you to have your shows within minutes of airing. (I joined some very big ones by entering first through W.CD which is now gone, and that took me about 6 months...not sure the best way to do it nowadays.)
The nice thing about Plex is that its client software works on just about everything. Alternatively you can go with Kodi, but there's invariably much more work involved, especially if you want to stream from anywhere. Rtorrent/rutorrent is by far the hardest thing to set up and get working properly in this setup, but alternatively you can go with deluge. I started with deluge but had to switch to rtorrent/rutorrent because deluge just couldn't handle over 1,000 torrents simultaneously available for seeding (this is necessary if you want to be able to quickly get invites to good private trackers...I don't have anywhere near this number anymore; somewhere around 150 now.) Deluge may be better now as this was a while ago.
Once it's set up, it's pretty much automatic. Sickrage is a pretty simple UI; just add your shows and it will very reliably grab them as they air. Just like a DVR only no commercials whatsoever, with a side benefit that your content can all be 1080p if you desire it, which not every cable company offers on every channel (Cox certainly doesn't; even premium channels are generally 720p.)
If there was such thing as a streaming service that had no commercials and had all of the content I wanted, I'd probably do that instead, but such a thing straight up just doesn't exist. I was actually first motivated to do all of this because my cable company (Cox) DRM flagged all channels, so I was stuck with buggy, unreliable, and convoluted as fuck Windows Media Center with no ability to strip out commercials. After going so far as to try to petition the FCC and failing, piracy just made by far the most sense.