14 DAY TRIAL // One of the reasons why online piracy is so popular, one that is gleefully ignored by big media in their anti-piracy tirades, is because it's so easy. Go to your favorite BitTorrent site, search for the movie, album, episode, season that you want and with just a few steps it will be on your computer.
Getting the same thing legally would require several more steps and you'd need a lot more sources to get everything you need, one site that you need to sign up to and hand over your credit card information for your music, another for movies from some studios, another for some TV shows, another for documentaries, another for games and so on.
Of course, that's assuming that you can get what you want legally. Granted, no one owes you the privilege of allowing you to buy their stuff, but if they withhold something from their potential audience, they shouldn't be surprised if people turn to pirating instead.
But this simplicity is only skin deep, your movies and your TV shows have a long winding road until they arrive at your local BitTorrent site. In fact, in the file-sharing world, BitTorrent sites are the bottom of the food chain, they may be the largest in terms of users but they're hardly the most important.
Most quality content comes from scene releases that trickle down to BitTorrent sites
The upper echelons of piracy have different, better sources for their content access to private FTP sites that get everything you'd find on BitTorrent sooner and in better quality.
The last part is important, scene FTPs will only carry the best quality content and this quality is maintained, as in any field, via standards.
You may think of pirates as an anarchic, disorganized bunch, but the top ones, the ones that actually acquire and release the stuff you find on a file-sharing sites, care about standards, rules and reputation a great deal.
Top pirates care about standards
Quite recently, a number of scene groups that focus on TV content issued their latest guidelines for video formats. It's a technical file, but it's a very interesting read if you're into this type of things, it lists all the proper codecs, compression presets and everything else you'd need to know if you were to put out a "scene-approved" release.
Regularly, this type of thing would be of interest to very few people, except the latest "document" banned the use of the Xvid Codec and instead requires the newer and better x264.
x264 leads to better quality and smaller files. What's more, it's also supported on all desktop operating systems and most mobile ones as well. However, many hardware devices, DVD players and the like, don't support x264.
The angry pirate
This led to an interesting phenomenon, the angry pirate. A lot of BitTorrent users are very disappointed about the move, though quite a few have no idea why it happened, and they're very vocal about it.
Many are even threatening to change BitTorrent sites over the issue. That would not fix anything since everyone uses the same sources, but that's beside the point. It's a perfect example of entitlement, people are demanding that they get the shows they want in the format that they want, even though they're not paying anything for them.
Still, people make the same kind of demands to Google, which also offers most of its services for free, it's the status quo of the web at this point. The "problem" in this case is that the angry pirates are going to have even less of a chance to change anything than they would with Facebook or Google, since most scene groups don't really care about BitTorrent. In fact, they'd much rather not have their releases leaked to BitTorrent at all.