There used to be this funny anti pirate advertisement, that tried to raise awareness in people to check if they maybe have a pirated DVD and not the original.

Somehing like, make sure your DVD

- has unskippable advertisment - long intro, also unskippable - ...

If you don't have all that, but just a video that just plays the movie, you got to rush to the store and buy the legal obstructed version.

This is so true, I pirated movies that I was ready to pay for so many times, just because they weren't available in my area, or there were no subtitles, or they only offered 720p.

You can download a MTK file at 4K with multiple audio tracks and subtitles and more often than not there are enough seeders to just start watching it while it downloads in the background.

They need to wake up.

Pirated media also can't be silently and remotely censored or edited. It's also increasingly the only way to consume media where somewhere somebody isn't keeping a highly detailed record of every time you access it (when, where, how long, how often, etc.).

You can't even watch a DVD or bluray these days without a record of what you're watching and when being stored and sent over the internet. Companies like Roku are doing multiple screencaptures every second and uploading those to content recognition systems.

It's also a usability thing.

Downloaded stuff comes into one service on a server I own (Jellyfin or Plex) and I can see _everything_ there. Every movie and TV show.

On the official services, that I pay for, I need to go through a good half dozen trying to see what's where this time.