Pirating was never my intention either. For me AnyDVD was very helpful for:
- DVDs and Blu-Ray, which are not available or only available in inferior quality for my region, thus circumventing regional locking was a solution.
- DVDs and Blu-Rays which have ridiculously annoying intros and don't allow to skip them, and also no support for resume. This is a pain especially on TV shows. Removing user prohibitions or ditching the menus altogether is true joy on those discs.
- Blu-Rays of TV shows with German dubbing pitched down. I need a way to watch them in PAL speed to correct this issue. Many TV shows' dubbings have this issue since they frequently (but not always) were done on sped up material for PAL TV. The French speaking audience in NTSC territory also have this issue on DVD. Most of the time, the studios just don't seem to bother and ignoring any complains regarding this. With ReClock and MPC-HC, I can easily fix this, thanks to AnyDVD that is.
- For movies which I like to watch in German, but no German track available on any DVD or Blu-Ray. In that case, I use the audio from a TV recording or VHS release and multiplex it with the high quality video to enjoy.
- I also got my experience with norm conversions, thanks to AnyDVD. I really hate 3:2 judder, but many TV shows in the 80's and 90's were shot on film with 24 fps and then cut in NTSC ignoring frame patterns, which makes good norm conversions rather complex. In many cases, I managed to do much better conversions then officially available PAL DVDs, thus I can enjoy the show without the judder and still have a decent picture quality.
- I also like to copy discs to a hard drive in order to reduce noise level.
And I did not upload nor did I sold anything of that. I respect their copyright. I bought hundreds of disks. Sometimes even more than one version, just to combine one video with the audio of another.
Also I don't think that piracy would be much different if AnyDVD didn't existed, as it only can defeat disc based protections. Pretty much all major movies are illegally available even before they are released on disc.
If steaming should be the only way to get a movie one day, I really hope that our fox gets a relative which makes it possible to back up your streams then. I wouldn't "buy" a stream, if I can't.