Featured in Farrago Magazine Edition Six 2026

Media piracy has had a resurgence as an alternative media consumption channel in recent years—but even in an age of technofeudalism, can we forgo its ethical and legal implications? 

I can fondly recall the day in 2019 when Disney+ launched in Australia. It was a big deal to a teenager who’d made a point of watching every film in the Walt Disney Animation Studios catalogue. It was understandable that Disney would capitulate to what was, at the time, still a developing landscape of streaming services made by film and television studios, promising complete access to their back catalogue and the vague promise of new, original programming. But in the years since, streaming services seem to have created just as many issues as they have purportedly solved when it comes to entertainment consumption.

And it’s an experience that’s becoming all the more common: you sign up to a streaming service solely for the purpose of watching a particular TV show you’re interested in. If you’re lucky, you’ll remember to cancel your free trial before the end of the following month rolls around. In other cases, you’ll have a sudden urge to occupy your evening with a film you’ve been meaning to watch for months, only to find that it’s not available on any of the streaming services you’re already paying for. And if you’re brave enough to venture onto the Apple or Google Play stores to rent or buy a program, it’s likely that the latter option will afford you just as little permanent ownership as the former. In amongst all of this, streaming services continue to raise their monthly and annual subscription costs, each time prompting users to assess the value of continuing to pay this new price.

There’s no denying that the streaming model has fundamentally reconfigured the economic structures of the film and television industries. So too has it restructured the terms of employment for actors, filmmakers and crew members in the entertainment industry, including rates of pay, residuals and unauthorised digital representations of likenesses. These concerns were at the heart of the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, which indicated a widespread dissatisfaction with the implications of this reconfiguration brought to a fever pitch. Despite the fact that an agreement ultimately reached among members of the union, its resolutions are neither watertight nor all-encompassing. Much has been written about the 2026 Paramount-Warner Bros merger, which has implications for the streaming libraries of both companies, not to mention for the influx of foreign investors into the fold and continued concerns about Paramount’s ties to the current Trump administration. This has reignited conversations about the structures of the entertainment ecosystem both in Hollywood and on a global scale. What the merger could mean for, if nothing else, the availability of content on existing streaming services is a problem in and of itself. It’s not uncommon even now to go onto a streaming platform and see a “Leaving Soon” marker above a poster for what is purportedly an original program exclusive to the service itself. Various platforms, including HBO Max and Netflix, have also become notorious for completely eliminating any access whatsoever to programs they had previously financed and/or distributed, much to the chagrin of the cast and crew who appeared in them. In the face of such corporate restructuring, it’s difficult not to assume that these issues will only become more pronounced.

The issues of ownership and access that characterise modern streaming systems have contributed in part to the resurgence of the media piracy ecosystem as an alternative channel for media access and consumption. Media piracy as a practice first emerged in 19999 via Napster, a peer-to-peer music sharing service that allowed users access to people’s hard drives to share MP3 files. Napster sent shockwaves through the music industry at the turn of the century. This led to the filing of a lawsuit against the platform by A&M Records, Inc in 2001, which ultimately held that Napster could be held liable for contributory infringement (when a third party like a peer-to-peer platform facilitates an individual’s infringement of intellectual property rights) and vicarious infringement (when a platform benefits financially or otherwise from an individual’s infringement) of copyright. The Pirate Bay—the most popular online index for the peer-to-peer sharing of video, audio and other media—was launched a few years later in 2003. By 2008, BitTorrent—the communication protocol for peer-to-peer file sharing—had become the most popular file sharing network on the Internet. Naturally, the Pirate Bay has also been involved in several lawsuits, as both a plaintiff and defendant, regarding copyright infringement and commercial exploitation. After 2008, peer-to-peer traffic began to decrease, due to the emergence of other video sharing platforms like YouTube and the dawn of legitimate streaming platforms like Netflix and Hulu. 

Despite this decline in popularity, statistics demonstrate a renaissance in BitTorrent and media piracy. In 2024, piracy sites were visited over 216 billion times, while the U. S. Chamber of Commerce has repeatedly reported multibillion-dollar losses to the US economy as a result of piracy-related issues. Piracy is also particularly prevalent in countries such as Russia, China and Indonesia, where streaming platforms such as Netflix, Hulu and/or Spotify are unavailable or have been prohibited. The Pirate Bay remains one of the ten most popular torrent indexes as of 2025.

The issues surrounding the use and organisation of streaming platforms are part and parcel of a growing concern regarding the notion of technofeudalism. The term has an indeterminate origin but is best codified by French philosopher Cédric Durand in his 2020 text Technoféodalisme: Critique de l’économie numérique (published in English as How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism: The Making of the Digital Economy in 2024). The book charts the evolution of modern digitisation on a global scale, leveraging the system of feudalism to explore the economic, political and social implications of tech companies and their reliance on control over data, content and the manner in which we, as users, engage with any and all forms of digital media. While Napster emerged as a more modest rebuttal to the limitations placed on digital file sharing at the time, the media piracy renaissance today seems to speak more to a growing dissatisfaction among consumers with these technofeudalist models. Today’s media pirate does so with the notion that if purchasing doesn’t constitute owning, piracy doesn’t constitute stealing. It’s a valid argument in theory, but not necessarily in practice. Piracy is, of course, illegal. Many of us will recall the Motion Picture Association’s piracy public service announcement that was encoded onto commercially distributed DVDs. Today, it remains an iconic signifier of 2000s pop culture and physical media, a relic of a former medium that has now been veiled in a nostalgic sheen, but the weight of its messaging hasn’t diminished. Piracy also poses threats to individual digital devices and digital networks if corrupt or otherwise malicious files are accessed via BitTorrent. But on the other hand, piracy does appear to be the logical conclusion when the issues posed by the current streaming market and accessibility to entertainment media continue to abound. Many game developers, for example, have encouraged audiences to pirate their games, arguing that they themselves wouldn’t have been able to access media objects formative to them if it weren’t for piracy platforms. Here, piracy makes access to art and culture an equal playing field in socioeconomic terms, a virtual Library of Alexandria from which no-one is barred entry. Media piracy also circumvents the issues raised by licensing agreements for digital content that users have in fact purchased, such as eBooks, and the companies that leverage these agreements for their own benefit. It’s not difficult to visualise this kind of sharing of digital resources as a form of digital community formation in and of itself, pirate ships in the night passing one another and exchanging resources without any attendant issues of scarcity and/or depletion.

But media piracy, particularly with film and television programs, is situated in a difficult position where theatrical releases and experiential value are concerned. In a post-COVID era, reliable box office returns for any theatrically released film have become all the more precarious and unpredictable. For every Obsession or Backrooms that sparks conversation about the staying power of the theatrical experience, hundreds of other recent releases fail to turn a profit. For every new box office record set by IP films or legacy sequels, there’s conversations about superhero fatigue and creative bankruptcy. Even when alternative media channels like BitTorrent are readily available, it also contributes to this broader economic instability for cinemas as entertainment continues its migration to the digital. In amongst conversations about the access and ownership afforded by digital media, piracy ultimately takes up the same mantle as streaming services do—a mode of engagement that fails to properly remunerate artists for the work they have done and one that prioritises, above all else, expediency.

So, where can we as media consumers go from here? Well, for one, there have been recent developments in media industries for the better with regards to some of these overarching issues. A 2026 class action lawsuit against Sony found the entertainment company liable for the monopolization of their digital game market, resulting in a $7.85 million settlement that will be paid out to PlayStation Store users who have been impacted by Sony’s manipulation of purchasing terms. Furthermore, Netflix has announced that, following a contentious relationship with US cinemas regarding theatrical release windows, they have agreed to distribute and report on revenue for films of theirs that are being positioned as 2027 awards season contenders. On the one hand, the media piracy renaissance represents the conflation of multiple issues with access to and engagement with media today, not to mention the various systems—economic, political and social—that shape and are shaped by entertainment industries. While media piracy serves as a quick, convenient fix for the problems this poses for consumers, it doesn’t address the broader implications of streaming services—and practically every other digitally-focused business the world over—and their technofeudalist tendencies. It also doesn’t address the viability nor the importance of cinemas, which continue to face largely diminished box office returns across the world. 

In any case, the medium is the message here: the statistical resurgence of BitTorrent articulates a growing dissatisfaction with these digital platforms, whose emphasis on financial returns and capital growth takes priority over the values and interests of the users. Thus, when engaging with media—whether it be film, television, music, gaming or otherwise—it’s important to consider not only what, but where and how we choose to consume: Who benefits? Who suffers? Which do I value the most between ease of access, experiential value, ownership and cost in this particular circumstance? It’s a difficult line—or plank, if you will—to walk, but it’s one of many we must all traverse in our digitally mediated lives nonetheless.