The Convenience Curve: Why Piracy is a Service Problem

Human behavior is a simple equation: in any digital system, the path of least friction always wins.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, if you wanted to listen to a specific song, you had two choices: spend 20 Marks on a CD that had one good track and eleven fillers, or dive into the “petri dish” of Napster, Limewire, or Gnutella.

It was a Wild West. You’d wait three hours for a 128kbps MP3 only to find out it was actually a 30-second loop of silence or, worse, a piece of malware that turned your PC into a zombie. It was inconvenient, dangerous, and unreliable—but it was still more “convenient” than the retail alternative.

The Usenet Underground

While the masses were fighting with Limewire, the “builders” were using Newsgroups (Usenet). It’s a fascinating piece of internet history that refused to die. Originally designed for text-based discussion, it was hacked into a massive, distributed file-sharing system.

Usenet was (and still is) the pure infrastructure play: binary blobs hidden in text headers, requiring specialized “newsreaders” and indexers. It offered high speeds and high anonymity, but it required a level of technical literacy that acted as a natural barrier to entry. For the average user, piracy wasn’t about the “theft”—it was about the availability.

The German Copper Curse

As the rest of the world began to eye fiber optics, Germany hit a self-inflicted bottleneck. In the 1980s, the administration under Chancellor Helmut Kohl made a decision that would haunt German infrastructure for forty years.

Instead of banking on the emerging fiber-optic technology (which some of his own postal advisors suggested), Kohl pushed for copper cable. Why? It was a mix of political lobbying and ties to the traditional cable industry (notably Leo Kirch). While countries like South Korea and Sweden were laying the foundations for gigabit societies, Germany was doubling down on the “Post-Kohl” copper grid.

This infrastructure lag made the early streaming era in Germany a frustrating experience of buffering wheels and “GEMA” blocks, keeping the piracy flame alive much longer than in neighboring territories.

The Golden Age of Convenience

Then came the pivot. Netflix, which started as a DVD-by-mail service (after a failed initial attempt at a traditional rental model), realized that the future wasn’t in the post—it was in the bitstream.

When Netflix and early Spotify hit the scene, piracy saw a massive, global dip. Why? Because they solved the Service Problem. As Gabe Newell (Valve/Steam) famously said: “Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.”

For a flat monthly fee, you got a limitless, high-quality, safe, and searchable catalog. The friction dropped to near zero. Piracy couldn’t compete with that level of convenience. For a few years, it felt like we had finally “solved” content distribution.

The Re-Cable-ification of Everything

Fast forward to today. The “Gold Rush” is on. Every studio, from Disney to Paramount to NBC, realized they were leaving “pennies on the table” by licensing their content to a central hub. They wanted to own the user. They wanted the data, the habits, and the direct billing relationship.

The result is a fragmented mess that I call Cable 2.0:

• You need Netflix for one show.
• You need Disney+ for the kids.
• You need Amazon Prime (which is now just a shopping portal with an increasingly ad-heavy video side-hustle).
• You need Paramount+ or Peacock for the one movie you actually wanted to see.

We have recreated the cable bundles of the 90s, but with more passwords and more “administrative burden.” Some efforts, like CNN+, failed spectacularly because they overestimated the “must-have” nature of their gated content.

The Repeating Cycle: Systemic Failure by Design

We aren’t seeing a new phenomenon; we are watching a closed-loop system reset itself. The medium has changed from 700MB DiVX files to 4K HDR streams, but the corporate impulse remains the same: capture, gate, and monetize friction.

The surge in VPN adoption is the most visible symptom of this systemic rot. Look at the Netherlands, which has evolved into the world’s VPN bastion. This isn’t an accident. The combination of the AMS-IX (Amsterdam Internet Exchange) capacity and historically robust privacy laws created a perfect environment for providers. While they market “privacy,” the primary business model is clear to any engineer: providing an endpoint for users to bypass the arbitrary hurdles of the modern web.

This brings us to the absurdity of Geographical Licensing. We are still applying 19th-century regional distribution logic—born from the Berne Convention (1886) and the physical shipping of manuscripts—to a medium that exists at the speed of light. When you increase the friction of access, you inevitably fan the flames of piracy.

The Architect’s Pivot: Designing for Zero Friction

Everything is a system. Technology, content, and the governing legal frameworks form a single ecosystem. Without optimized symbiosis, the system breaks. Users are rational actors; they will always find a way to optimize the cycle for themselves.

In our own work as software developers and infrastructure architects, we have to consider the User Journey as part of the technical spec. As soon as licensing becomes a burden—as soon as the user has to jump through three hoops to access a product they paid for—they will pivot to a “five-finger discount” solution. Not because they are criminals, but because the illicit solution is objectively a better piece of engineering.

The few cents gained by rolling a proprietary, gated platform are often lost to the overhead of maintenance and the resulting user churn. If the industry wants to stop the “High Seas” from winning, they have to stop competing on content and start competing on Simplicity.

If you want people to pay, make it easier to pay than to steal. It’s that simple.

Historical References & Fact Checks

• The Kohl Copper Decision: Historical records confirm Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s 1982 decision to prioritize copper for cable TV over fiber-optic infrastructure, influenced by relationships with media moguls like Leo Kirch.
• The RIAA Lawsuits: Capitol v. Thomas (2007) saw a mother fined $222,000 for sharing 24 songs on Kazaa, illustrating the era of litigation over service.
• VPN Bastion Netherlands: The Netherlands has been a hub for hosting and privacy due to the AMS-IX and Dutch privacy protections (e.g., the Wet op de inlichtingen- en veiligheidsdiensten).
• Archaic Licensing: The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1886) set the global standard for copyright, which remains the root of regional licensing despite the digital shift.
• Sandvine Global Internet Phenomena Report: Recent data shows a direct correlation between streaming service fragmentation and the resurgence of BitTorrent traffic.