Europe

Piracy is an act of robbery or criminal violence by ship or boat-borne attackers upon another ship or a coastal area, typically with the goal of stealing cargo and other valuable goods.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy

What nearly half of Young Norwegians are fine with is not piracy. It is unlicensed consumption of copyrighted media. There is a difference, and we should stop blurring the lines.

If the people pirating weren't going to buy the product in the first place, are they even hurting anyone?

Yeah like no shit Sherlock...

I am neither Norwegian nor young, but can only agree with the premise. We have been paying for Netflix for many years, Netflix seemed to be back in the day a company that understood what was needed to be done against piracy. A couple of years ago we thought of adding Disney+ to our subscriptions as it is great for the kids. I'll pay happily if the service and content is worth it, but I can't justify adding also HBO, Hulu, Amazon, Apple+... Guess what happens if I can't watch a show because it's not available where I live (happens too often) or it's in yet another subscription walled platform? And that would be for content I dont even own and can watch whenever, it just might disappear... I also have what I consider a rather large collection of DVDs and BRs, at least I own those but I hate using them (too much unskippable stuff, warnings (threats) against pirating, annoying to use as I need to switch discs for changing content...), and that's just not a good way of discovering new content, its only for those I really like and want to have and rewatch.

I've returned to piracy as well. Setup a plex server, filled it with MP3s and videos and it's great. No fucking subscription. No ads. Nobody except me can delist anything. If I want something to be there, it will be there and not on some competing streaming service. And when you take into account that Spotify will pay Rednex 0,00286€ when you stream Cotton Eye Joe, you're also not really hurting the artists.

I've been pirating movies and series on and off for a long time. The most recent revival was a few years back thanks to Paw Patrols availability in the country I live in. It is not on Netflix there, only on a national TV station and their app is terrible, so couldn't give that to my kid without causing frustration.

We travelled for holidays and I wasn't aware that Netflix had differences between the countries in what they offered to stream. Well, there Netflix had Paw Patrol. Try explaining to a 4-year old why now they can watch a series but back home it is gone.

So back home I started reading up on Jellyfin, and just pirated the whole series for my kid a few weeks down the line. Obviously no need from my end to stop there, its just so much easier than trying to jump around streaming services.

Contrast that with my recent revival of PC gaming (thanks Steam Deck!). I could easily go for pirating there too but thanks to Steam and GOG, I don't bother. So yeah media industry. Its your own fault people do this.

The billionaires don't support me, why should I support the billionaires. (I don't even do piracy myself, I'm just an ideological supporter)

Anybody is perfectly free to boycott any product. But piracy doesn't feel right towards content creators. Heck, streaming services are dirty cheap these days and if you can't pay 10€ or so per month, well, you're cheap.