When I was young, I did it a lot with Microsoft Office, Photoshop, Movies, MP3, and etc. Because I didn't have money.
I don't pirate anymore because I make money.
In this day of age, piracy has increased risk with malware that mines bitcoin or locks your disk for ransom, so the risk is much higher and effectively lowers the benefit.
> In this day of age, piracy has increased risk with malware that mines bitcoin or locks your disk for ransom, so the risk is much higher and effectively lowers the benefit.
I don't think that's true at all, rather the opposite in fact. Piracy feels much safer now than it was 20 years ago.
There was definitely a lot more junk (mislabeled or fake content, viruses, keyloggers, ...) shared on those networks. Even the Kazaa client itself was riddled with dubious adware.
Also legit content was of much poorer quality overall.
Today even public trackers are pretty clean. Cryptominers are trivially caught by Windows Defender. Effective ransomware campaigns are targeted at entities that can pay millions, not random individuals.
When I was young, I did it a lot with Microsoft Office, Photoshop, Movies, MP3, and etc. Because I didn't have money.
I don't pirate anymore because I make money.
In this day of age, piracy has increased risk with malware that mines bitcoin or locks your disk for ransom, so the risk is much higher and effectively lowers the benefit.