It’s not the fact they withheld from other steaming platforms that led to pirating- it’s the fact they made their catalog available digitally and cheap. For a long time there was no platform that had many “A” list Disney studio productions. Even on Amazon it was often that you could only buy many Disney films. Piracy is less attractive at $10 and up a pop. When you make it all available for like $3 and a limited time- the pirates flock to it and get all they can for basically nothing.
So really the mistake Disney made wasn’t withholding their product. That’s worked well for them for decades. The mistake they made was making their product available and cheap. As much as Disney is sinister and exploitive and not my favorite company ethically- they aren’t the “bad guy” here. It’s people. It isn’t Disney’s greed. They said “let’s make all our stuff available for cheap to people for once- so you don’t have to spend tons of cash to have the Disney experience.” And then masses stole from them- which only teaches them what? That being greedy and shady is the way to go if they want to make money, and they can’t trust people when they do give us a break. We create our own monsters.
Then again, why do people pirate? So they don’t have to pay ridiculous amounts of money. We’ve basically been conditioned to pirate anything just in case the price shoots up again...
I can’t recognize the logic. For example: classic movies can be had in physical media for under $10 new and often $5 or less used. Even new release movies can often be found for cheaper in physical media than they can be “bought” digitally. Once you’ve paid for a physical copy- you can watch it forever price fluctuations be darned.
Now- price fluctuations and such in digital media make lots of sense. If you “buy” a digital work- that work must be hosted on a server for as long as you may watch it. Those servers cost potentially huge amounts of money. They depreciate, need repaired and replaced, and are always using electricity. There’s rent and permits and the like on the facilities, IT professionals and management to administer them. A digital copy is more like running a giant movie theater than it is selling a movie. And the costs of that fluctuate.
There’s also demand pricing. The cost of IP tends to fluctuate with demand. A terrible new release might be $20 for awhile when it first hits physical media- and before long it’s $10, $5, so on. It’s harder to raise the price back up on physical media unless like Disney’s vault, you control the supply to limit second hand and other options.
But digital media- like pay per view or cable- can change price more easily with market conditions. The profit and pricing isn’t locked in either to what it was the day the media was made- the cost to deliver can change over time.
If people were concerned with price fluctuations in digital media they could buy physical. If they were concerned with fluctuations and didn’t want physical they could buy digital and never worry about price again. They could buy physical, copy it to digital, then sell the physical copy out or donate it or something.
Piracy CAN be a rebellion against corporate greed and averice. But by and large it usually isn’t. It’s usually just folks not wanting to pay money for things but also not wanting to be just a “common thief.” OCCASIONALLY piracy prompts companies to step back and re examine their behavior- but more often than not it leads to new ways to make things worse for consumers- be that DRM, “always and only online” access, etc.
The pirate says that Disney shouldn’t have charged “too much” if they didn’t want to get pirated... “if it was a reasonable cost I’d buy it...” but... right now I can buy a new copy of Mulan for $10 in a 20 second search, and it’s $15 to buy from prime video. $10 doesn’t seem an unreasonable amount to pay to own a lauded film does it? So most people who pirate would still pirate regardless of “reasonableness” because anything is more than free. That’s plain theft. They’d rather keep the money than give it to Disney- but want what’s being sold. So they stole it.
But what about when Disney or whoever defends their IP and prosecutes thieves? Most people will call them the bad guy then too. “How dare they pick on a college kid who just wants to see a movie...” so what’s the take away? Their only “good” and so you only should pay them if they make movies and give them away? Even Wikipedia has trouble with that business model and who doesn’t use Wikipedia?
But digital media- like pay per view or cable- can change price more easily with market conditions. The profit and pricing isn’t locked in either to what it was the day the media was made- the cost to deliver can change over time.
TLDR: Even though it often has bad outcomes, people are probably going to pirate stuff no matter the price.