So really it's like if someone usually takes food off the hot plate at a restaurant to steal it, and the one time they sit down and pay it's a shitty experience so they decide they're going to keep stealing lol.
Same happened with music (Sony had rootkit bundled in their CDs), DVDs (the FBI warning screen), games and so on. You get punished if you try to be a good behaving customer.
It's very hard to get caught and prosecuted for piracy though, which is why the "experience" is so much better.
Nah.
Take netflix for example: you pay your subscription and you get to watch movies. ez pz.
Now take the pirating route: you have to find torrents, such torrents have to have seeds, you need disk space, you need a torrenting app, you might have to leave your computer turned on for a long time etc etc.
Netflix is sucessful because they managed to make paying better than pirating.
Popcorn Time exists, and it's just as easy as Netflix. Much better catalogue too. It also downloads while streaming, so if you have to stop in the middle, you can more easily pick back up where you left off because it's already downloaded. Also you can then share this downloaded file with whomever you want because it's DRM free, but you can't send a Netflix movie to someone else, which was the author's main quibble anyway.
Much better UX for movies with piracy, even with Netflix, which is a great service.
But while it's widely known, it's still less easy to use than netflix.
Regardless, my broader point is a complete rejection of the idea that "businesses should just make getting X easier than piracy" is a reasonable point to make at all. The onus is not on the business.
Do you know what else is an easier experience when you steal? Clothes shopping. The UX is much better when you just walk in to a clothing store, pick out what you want, and then walk out. No waiting in a queue to checkout, no receipts, etc. etc. Clearly the onus is on clothing stores to make the experience of paying for the good easier than just walking out with them, right?
What about restaurants? Wouldn't it be so much nicer if you could just go in, sit, eat your meal, and then not have to pay? No having to deal with tipping, splitting the bill, arguing over charges, etc. Just walk in, eat, and leave. Clearly then the onus is on restaurants to make the "paying for your meal" experience easier than dining-and-dashing, right?
“So I bought it. For the first time in my life, I bought an ebook, because it's 2020, so why not.”
Yeah, ebooks are higher tech than paper, but I find the experience to be worse than paper.
I have no problem reading long-form content on a screen, but I'd rather be reading a long scrolling HTML page than a "paged" ePub or PDF.
I just set up an Obooquity server on my network so I can access my eBooks from any device, and I dislike the experience. FWIW, I dislike physical eBook readers and mobile eBook reading apps too.
DRM aside, I feel like "it's 2020", and the fact you have to flip pages to read eBooks to be somewhat ridiculous.
The problem with those vendors really comes down to selection, and they have a smaller selection. Like it or not, if there's something highly desirable and current, and he _must_ have it, he's going to have to deal with the inevitable pains of DRM, or resort to piracy.
I'm sure the bean counters at content producers have done the calculus of losing a certain percentage of prospective paying customers vs. convenience, and have decided that certain inconveniences are worthwhile.