Or you could also pay for your pay entertainment. It's really not expensive. I pirated an unbelievable amount of TV/movies in high school/college, but these days content providers have actually caught up and pretty much everything is available to stream somewhere legitimately, or purchase for pretty cheap. The argument for piracy has gotten very weak.
It always was. And I knew people years ago that did it when they could have easily afforded the content.
Years ago, TV/movie piracy offered a product you could not buy at any price.
It's 2009 (I'm in college), and I've heard about this show Arrested Development. I want to click a button on my computer and watch the first season. I can't do that legally.
My options:
I could check the TV schedule and see if there are reruns on, and then try to find when the first episode is on, plan my day around it, plug in my antenna and TV tuner, and then sit through ads and be unable to pause it. No thanks.
I could do the same thing, and buy a DVR or VCR or whatever, and record it. No thanks. I'd be able to fast-forward through the commercials and pause it to pee, but the quality would probably be janky, and I would have to buy hardware that I really don't want.
I could borrow the DVD set from the library, from a friend, or buy it. No thanks. FBI warning and unskippable trailers (for what was "upcoming" in 2003) and other garbage before the menu? Switching discs? Storing physical media? 480p?
Or, I could illegally click download and press play. It starts right from the beginning in perfect 1080p on my computer, and I happily watch it. That's what I did, instead of paying money for an inferior product. It's a great show.
In 2019, you can load up Netflix and just start. That's what I did last year when I rewatched the whole thing with my girlfriend. And was even easier than piracy was in 2009: we press a button our TV remote and it just shows up in 1080p. If you turn it off in the middle of something, it even keeps track of where you were for when you come back.
Netflix didn't start the "binging TV" trend; piracy did. They just made it easier, paid, and legal. The same cycle happened with MP3s and Napster ten years earlier. There's a reason Hulu, Amazon Prime, and Spotify (I think it's those three) all have cheap subscription options for students. They want to not only get you hooked on their service, but keep you away from the piracy route that used to be the only option. None of that existed (Spotify did, but you had to pretend you lived in Sweden and set up a VPN) in my heyday of piracy.
I pirated Game of Thrones until HBO Now was a thing. HBO saw the piracy numbers (it's been the top pirated show literally every year it's aired), and gave people a legal paid option that was better than the pirated option. Now they get my $15/mo during Game of Thrones season.
It also happened with PC gaming piracy and Steam. Gabe Newell, CEO of Valve:
"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."
The proof is in the proverbial pudding. "Prior to entering the Russian market, we were told that Russia was a waste of time because everyone would pirate our products. Russia is now about to become [Steam's] largest market in Europe," Newell said.