How Much Video Piracy is Caused by Lack of Legal Streaming and Rental?

Movie and video content owners have a notably complex way of allowing people to view new content. And some might argue content owners would suffer less content piracy if those content owners were a bit more flexible about the ways people could view content. 

A look at piracy rates for specific titles for a recent three week period shows that none of the most pirated titles were available for legal streaming and only 53 per cent were available to buy at all. About 20 percent of those titles were available to rent, according to researchers at the Mercatus Center. 

So content owners might be able to slash piracy rates by simply making content easily and legally available, rather than trying legal and technological hacks to sustain its current release model, in other words. 

The analysis of file-sharing news was based on TorrentFreak's weekly top-10 most-pirated media, cross-referenced with statistics on legitimate media buying and streaming, shown at Piracy Data.

Would legal alternatives halt all piracy? Probably not all piracy, one might guess, but nearly all of it. 

In Norway, where tough anti-piracy measures were put into place in June 2013, music piracy rates have been dropping dramatically, while TV and movie pirarcy also has dropped since 2008. 

Many would say that is because legal alternatives are more compelling.