I’ve been thinking about this more and more. According to the sidebar, this community is “A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.” Based on that I don’t think Plex qualifies.
Privacy: Plex clearly records the metadata of what you watch. When I used it, it would send me a report by email of what my “friends” were watching. Even with that turned off, their services still track telemetry.
Control: Plex has all of it. They can (and do) make unilateral changes to the service, how authentication works, where you can run it, etc.
So I ask, when you are hosting something that is entirely dependent on a commercial entity to function, is Plex really selfhosting in the spirit of this community?
If by “your definition of piracy” you mean your country’s laws surrounding it, then in the USA you would still be breaking the law. The FBI anti-piracy warning that they put at the beginning of movies to warning you about the anti-piracy laws specifies that the unauthorized reproduction OR distribution of copyrighted works is illegal.
I’ve got no moral qualms about the way I’m handling things, nor am I judging anybody for the way they handle things. My comment was simply meant to show that not everybody is using Plex for stolen media.