But when download speeds increased, piracy became an ever bigger problem.

The shift from VHS to DVDs to Blu-rays wasn’t as phenomenally successful for film and television as the CD boom was for music cinema and broadcast rights still made the lion’s share of revenue. The hope was that the film industry would repeat music’s success in tackling piracy. Where legal downloads peaked at 27% of the industry’s total revenue in 2014, last year streaming made up 62% of music revenue, with 2020 seeing the highest earnings since 2003. Streaming meant instant access and a better user experience than piracy. But music streaming, arriving with the launch of Spotify, changed everything. Illegal downloading wasn’t just cheaper than buying CDs, it was also more convenient than traipsing to the high street. Global recorded music sales peaked in 1999, at $25.2bn, then bottomed out 14 years later at barely half that. Napster, and then peer-to-peer filesharing, were the innovations that rocked music. Piracy was meant to follow the path set by the music industry: where technological change initially enabled new forms of copyright infringement, then spurred rejuvenation, settling into a new equilibrium. And even before the pandemic forced film studios to experiment with simultaneous cinema and home releases, we had access to more films and shows than any other point in history. If you have a niche interest, someone is streaming it for you somewhere: Sony’s Crunchyroll for anime fans, BFI Player for film buffs, Sky’s History Play for those who really like ancient aliens. Britain’s public service broadcasters have more box sets than you can consume in a lifetime.

Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV+ are pumping out award-winning shows. We are living in a golden age of streaming.

That particular choice might mark this story out as one that belongs firmly in the past, but piracy itself is far from dead. In between essays, I watched classic movies, listened to vast discographies, and binged the entire run of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I n the 2000s, I arrived at university to vast libraries, thousands of strangers and the riches of academic life – plus a gigabit broadband connection that would be used on downloading pirated versions of every piece of entertainment ever made.

The pirate download safe