Alongside the growth of the internet itself, digital piracy evolves and grows rampant each year in every crevice of the digital world. Whether it’s crappy theater footage from a cam-recorder of an early 2000s movie, or a high-resolution copy of the same movie on a website infested with inappropriate ads, piracy has always had a place on the internet.
Piracy, during both the early and modern-day internet, differentiates from its quality and relevance. One of the more notable piracy-related notions was an anti-piracy ad that
played in theaters and televisions during 2004. The ad compared piracy to something as extreme as stealing a car, which had little to no effect on its audiences. The commercial ended up becoming one of the first spikes of the normalization of piracy, as the video ended up pushing the idea of piracy onto new audiences that weren’t aware that they could pirate content for themselves.
While the ad was being continuously ridiculed, it hadn’t helped its case when it was eventually revealed that the text used in the ad wasn’t their own, but had been pirated as well.
As for modern day piracy, both the quality and methods to stream movies and shows has shot up exponentially. The most common way for most “pirates” tends to range within niche websites. Though, as mentioned before, there is a gross amount of ads that usually depict inappropriate topics.
Beside websites, there are still a handful of ways internet surfs for their favorite movies to actively avoid pricey streaming services that usually have what they’re looking for.
File Storage Services
Google Drive, a fairly recognizable site, tends to unintentionally aid in piracy as most pirates make folders that contain either entire movies or series to then spread around for people aiming for such specific media. There isn’t much to this, besides the fact that this is a fairly good substitution if you would rather avoid sketchy websites.
Though, the real challenge is finding folders for whatever you’re looking for.
Similar to Google Drive, MEGA presents the same purpose for pirating by allowing users to make folders with extracted media to send through links and QR codes. Differentiating itself from the more popular application, the storage site provides a much larger storage capacity for users for free.
While obviously users skimming through links don’t have to pay to view the folders, whether on MEGA or Google Drive, the individuals creating the folders by using MEGA won’t have to worry about a maximum capacity for large series.
Social Media
Twitter, though renamed X in 2023, has had its fair share of users who occasionally post full-fledged videos of entire movies. Though, if you’re looking for variety, Twitter tends to only repost The Lorax, Shrek, and Bee Movie every couple of months if you catch the right side of the timeline before it gets copyright-striken.
Besides the same couple of movies circulating the site most of the time, there are rare occasions where they’ll post new movies. The first time I managed to finally watch Sonic The Hedgehog 3 was on Twitter, a week or two after it was released in theaters. The quality was obviously iffy since it was barely starting to release digitally, though the audio was good enough, and I was left staring at my phone for the next two hours.
By the time the tweet was deleted from copyright in the morning, most users on the platform that saw it the night before had a handful of hours to rewatch it a good number of times.
Occasionally, users may post entire QR codes that lead to either a MEGA or Google Drive folder that contains the movie or show that the tweet says it would have. The risk is yours to take, whether or not you would like to scan a QR code or click a random link from a popular tweet you saw on the timeline. I would recommend just briefly checking the comments to see whether or not you’ll get what you were told you would see.
TikTok—one of the most popular apps of today that seems stuck in a purgatory-like state between potential bans—tends to only present full-length movies through its LIVE feature. It depends on the user’s For You Page whether or not they will stumble upon a live showcase of an entire movie by scaling it into full screen.
Similar to Twitter, I was able to briefly rewatch Sonic The Hedgehog 3 on a random TikTok LIVE during the Eggman dance scene before clicking off to resume doom-scrolling. I had assumed it would have been taken down not long after finding it. Though, to my surprise, it was still up and almost at the end of the movie by the time it resurfaced my “FYP” again.
I wouldn’t say TikTok is the best place to watch new movies if you choose to go through the social media route and it’s more random luck to find a good movie by accident through the LIVE section of the app.
Reddit, a site with a recovering infamous reputation, usually tends to send links or QR codes on posts within “sub-reddits” that correlate with the media or blatant piracy-based communities. There isn’t too much to talk about piracy on this site besides the usual nice groups of people that are willing to help new pirates guide themselves into a virus-free experience for their shows and movies.
Besides the major three sites that come to mind for rampant piracy, many other social media sites could have what you’re looking for—with the right searches of course.
Video-Hosted Services
YouTube—there’s not much of an introduction anyone could give, as it is currently and most likely to stay as the most popular and downloaded video player application on the internet. As for piracy, you may be able to find accounts with a jumble of random words as a name, with usually an entire series of specific anime titles.
Unlike the next service mentioned, they legitimately try to take down as much copyrighted content as they can as long as someone reports it. Which means certain playlists can stick around for years to come as long as a party-pooper doesn’t stumble upon it.
TeaTV—a free video-player application usually found on Fire TV Stick, takes pride in still existing while actively protecting itself from being referred to as a pirating app and instead a “host-service.” This action alone is questionable when you open their library and see any movie and or show you could think of. Similar to YouTube, they host added content, pirated content, as a main focus of their app, which allows viewers to have a multitude of options of varying quality resolutions when picking what to watch.
When I had watched Superman (2025) with my dad the weekend after release, neither of us were able to catch the ending due to an emergency. Thus, he presented the app to me when we got home and we were able to finish the movie.
The movie itself, of course, was funky in both audio and visuals. Though we chopped it up to the fact that the movie literally just came out in theaters solely and we had doubted anyone could have gotten a better version than what we got.
The “Big Deal” with Pirating
By now, hopefully the average person has come to realize—is there actually anything wrong with pirating? Whether you view it as morally and/or legally wrong, most people have viewed a pirated version of some type of media without realizing it.
Those YouTube lyric videos from 2016-2019 made by random accounts? Those are technically illegally pirated music, as it uses copyrighted songs for a monetized video that receives its money from the hefty amount of views it usually gains throughout the years. Remember, “technically”, since most artists just ignore them by not striking them as they’re deemed harmless and rarely take action on the creators.
So…why is there suddenly a line drawn for movies and shows? A line drawn not by individual people, but by large and wealthy companies themselves? Companies that choose on a whim whether or not to remove specific content from their own designated services for their content—the internet forever as it’s no longer accessible anywhere else—when it’s decided it’s no longer profitable, while it clearly has people still in favor of it.
The reason becomes agonizingly obvious when streaming services as a whole are estimated to suffer from a cumulative loss of 113 billion dollars from piracy by 2027. From as low as Hulu’s assumed monthly loss of 40 million dollars per month to as high as Netflix’s 192 million dollars per month.
This in turn, is reasonable in their eyes, causing service prices to spike up to prevent such a catastrophe in profits. Yet, it only increases the problem of piracy by tenfold.
Whether or not they do lose the 113 billion dollar loss, corporations most likely won’t learn from what caused it. Not solely from the act of piracy, but the increase of prices and decrease in basic content.
The average person gets into streaming services over cable for the comfort of no ads and to watch specific content at a specific time. Something that lacks to stay prevalent today as services bump up prices to offer a cheaper and crappier version of the same site ridden with ads for a price that would have previously been what the no-ads subscription had been. Let alone what we’ve brought up before—companies on a whim deciding to remove content that was solely on their site, making it “lost media.”
It’s only a waiting game between money-hungry corporations worsening as inflation rises while people only want to watch a specific and niche movie of their choice without dealing with problems streaming services dug for themselves.