A'Hoy, Mateys! It's me, Jervis Cottonbelly. Let's talk about piracy.

Sir, I'll be blunt here.
I've pirated music, games, movies, shows and wrestling for close to 10 years now. Back in 2007 when I was watching wrestling daily, I pirated every PPV, every TV show, every shoot interview, every single wrestling media I've seen in my life - I havent paid a cent for it. Prior to 2007, every single file on my PC was downloaded from the internet. I was even an uploader in a major torrent tracker for 3 years. Not proud of this, but this is the way it is.
In 2010 I bought a multiplayer game, because I couldn't pirate it and play it. This led to me buying a second game, a third game, a fourth game, so on. In 2015, my PC has absolutely 0 pirated material. I have bought all of my games. My Steam (online video game provider) value is $1900. (3400 Bulgarian Leva, a LOT of money), I've bought every Battle.net game except for StarCraft and WarCraft. I even own some Origin games. 30 boxed games. I listen to music on Spotify, and I watch South Park only (you can watch it for free on their website). Whenever I want to watch wrestling, I watch it on a streaming service live every time I want to watch wrestling.
Why am I saying this? It's because if a person really wants to own something, he is going to buy it. I'm telling you first hand, there isn't a single CHIKARA fan who wouldn't pay to watch your show. The "that's potential X money" thing is old and tired, and not true a lot of times. Most people who have downloaded it are people who want to glance through it, or just want to see a new show for a change. They wouldn't pay to watch your show regardless of weather it was uploaded or not.
Unfortunately, it's how it is, I personally do not condone piracy anymore, I've embraced the life of actually buying stuff I like, and it's fucking great, but piracy isn't something you stop by appealing to the pirates. If your show dies tomorrow, none of them will actually care about it. Also, piracy has been around a long time, even before there was internet. Pirate VHS tapes, recording music through radio with tape decks, many more. Major music labels, video game developers and movie studios lose billions of dollars on a daily basis because of pirates. You shouldn't personalise it. Most people don't know, but streaming services like Netflix, Spotify and even in a way, the WWE Network exist today because of pirates. They didn't fight piracy, because they know they can't - they adapted by introduced a new and cheaper way to give content.
It shouldn't be like this. People who defend piracy are the most annoying cunts, because deep down they know they are in the wrong (like I was), but they either can't or don't want to pay for their content, so they have to justify doing it somehow. It IS wrong, though. Sadly, posts like this do absolutely nothing. I'm sorry.
Good luck.

/r/SquaredCircle Thread