You ignored the other ways in which one illicit downloader contributes to other downloaders, and ignored the original point, which is that torrent sites like Torrentspy do not obviously do "vast amounts of good", as you originally claimed. Do you feel like your arguments are convincing?
All freeloading is vastly good for the freeloaders, Kevin. Do we need to go through the pointless excercise of demonstrating all the instances of freeloading that you aren't comfortable with?
>Do we need to go through the pointless excercise of demonstrating all the instances of freeloading that you aren't comfortable with?
Go for it.
In the end, I am comfortable with the damage done to content producers. Since there appears to be no solution that will maintain the status quo, there's going to be dramatic change in the information industry. Already, smart commercial software developers sell a service rather than a binary executable. I love live music, soon I will be able to see more of it. There will be less uber-produced studio music, but I'm fine with that. I don't care for Hollywood blockbuster movies. They're ok sometimes, but I can handle a future without them. I watch TV with advertisements when it is available online; generally there are far fewer commercials than in the cable/broadcast version.
What do you think the solution to the problem is? Or describe your idealized where content producers are fairly compensated when technology allows for their works to be freely copied.
Which way could a careful user not avoid contributing to that kind of climate?
The "vast" good is the over 50% of downloads (my estimate) that wouldn't have been purchases anyway. Even if it's 5%, that's still a lot of value of movies/etc that people get that is good.
How is it "good" for people to get things they place a value of zero dollars on? How does that "good" outweigh the damage they do by disincentivizing content creation? If infinitessimally small costs are OK in the case of torrents, as you say they are, why vaccinate your children? That, too, imposes a tiny cost on everyone else. Why pay your taxes? Why not send spam? Your spam messages impose a tiny cost on everyone, compared to the major spam factories.
It's not a value of zero dollars. People don't buy (or rent) things when the price is higher than the value to them. If the price is $10, and the value to them is $3, they wouldn't buy it.
Your argument is incoherent. It observes that, at $70,000, a BMW M5 is priced too high for me to buy it. So, I should simply take it, blaming BMW for mispricing it.
