As an American living in Australia, I'd say your perspective is kind of skewed by the American market. A large number of torrenters aren't cheapskates or thieves but are from outside the U.S. and unable to even get ahold of this stuff due to the way licensing overseas works. Or if they do, it's at 1.5x-2.5x the price.

We have a 21st century distribution model tied to a mid-20th century legal framework and business model. It's hard to say what is fair in every case. What I feel is not fair is throwing the book at all of these site owners, especially when the laws are written in the U.S. but are somehow stretched to where they apply to people who never set foot there.

In 5-10 years, they could still be in jail while technology remakes itself to the point where either distribution and payment has finally started working gain, or torrenting has gotten to the point where it's nearly impossible to trace the activity to any one person. Neither option seems unlikely, and punishing people now for something that doesn't hurt anyone too much does not seem like it's worth it.

I'll give some more examples of use cases where the torrent system serves users better than the legal distribution, but has nothing to do with money.

My wife is Brazilian and I'm British, so we're trying to bring our son up as bilingual. Trying to find legally distributed mainstream kids films dubbed in Portuguese is incredibly hard. Sure, you can buy them in Brazil... and then they don't play on hardware in the UK. Neither Netflix nor Amazon Prime have them. Meanwhile, a quick search on a torrent download site gives me access to hundreds of mainstream films dubbed in Portuguese.

Torrents allow me to watch anything, anywhere, with minimal hardware. I don't need to buy DVDs or DVD players. I don't have to work out which subscription I need to use to watch the latest episode of a program. I have downloaded torrents for which I already own the Blu-ray DVD, but it's in a box somewhere and I can't be bothered to find it.

So yeah, there are lots more use cases for torrents than just wanting to be a cheapskate.

Similarly in the UK - if [!] our DVD player broke, someone might torrent the content we've paid for when we bought the DVDs on our shelf here.

Of course that may be a tortuous infringement. In the UK we briefly had a right to format shift but the media corps managed to kill that breakout of common sense pretty quickly.

We're in a pretty ridiculous legal situation again now, https://torrentfreak.com/itunes-is-illegal-under-uk-copyrigh... - ripping a CD you own is considered copyright infringement. It's moronic, there's no way the public would ever vote for this situation.

If such format shifting were to happen, I don't see what could possibly considered morally wrong about it?

Note: You can find some shows on youtube.

Cheers and abraços

My son liked Fishtronaut / Peixonauta [1] which was made in Brazil and released in Portuguese, Spanish, and English simultaneously, I think (it's on Netflix in the US).

1: http://tvpinguim.com/peixonauta/

Obrigado! We found a few kids shows - Palavra Cantada has a great channel on there, and there are a few Turma da Monica episodes.

But not films like Toy Story.

That was my point though -- excluding people who are in different markets, have special language needs, etc. etc. you're left with 95+% of the US market who have very efficient ways of legally licensing all but the very latest unreleased or specialty content. Yet still a huge number of those people pirate that content. So I just don't buy the argument that it's a lack of efficient systems that leads people in the US to pirate stuff. I suspect they do it because it's become socially acceptable and they'd just rather not pay for stuff they can get for free.

The motivation of people can vary a lot. For a big part of the world, the price of digital content is just not realistic at all.

For other people, like me, it's the lack of a reliable, convenient, well done solution. I won't touch iTunes with a 50 feet pole. All the on demand services I've tried have a limited catalog, reliability problems, stupid policies, try to push a bunch of stuff down my throat.

The torrent flow is perfect. Type the name of almost anything, wait 5-15min for it to download. Quality is amazing, no commercials, no bullshit.

I would gladly pay $100/month if I could go to IMDB and have a one click, 1080p download button on everything. Seriously.

> it will be in better quality than the torrent which was ripped off some TV broadcast and re-compressed

Sorry to say, but that is very out of touch.

The problem is that where I'm from, $100 is a weeks pay. An average Blu-ray costs a full days wage. VOD solutions exist, but they are expensive, poor quality, and are usually not in configuration I want/like(no subtitles/forced subtitles/forced dub). The internet is a global thing - a US or UK citizen can easily afford a brand new film. But move slightly further away from 1st world countries and new media is either too expensive for your average person or simply not available.

I used the $100 to express that I would be willing to spend a decent chunk of cash on a great service, I agree the price would need to be adjusted depending on the country.

I've lived in South America for quite some time, and paying $20 for a movie is completely out of the question for 95% of people. Piracy is completely open here, everywhere you have shops burning and selling bootleg DVDs for around $1.

I'd pay like a buck or two (or three) per movie. I don't have time to watch a movie every day. I tried Netxflix but they had at most a fifth of the movies I was looking for, so I cancelled the service again. I don't understand why the studios don't have sites of their own where I can just pay a bit and download a copy of any movie they ever made.

I'm a person in (1) the Netherlands, who wants to watch the (2) latest season of the Game of Thrones, runs (3) Linux without Apple-software like iTunes, and who does not want to buy (4) single items but has subscriptions on a service like Spotify.

The solution is not to educate the public, but to fix the distribution model.

Even my little sister has been using online streaming sites since she was 12, because she wanted to continue watching her favourite TV show, but in english, so she could pretend to be learning something for school while having fun.

No way to get the english dub even anywhere close to release in Germany, so the only solution was such a streaming site.

And now with the VPN ban, Netflix is useless, too. There's no realistic alternatives.

It's not that I want conntent for free, I just don't want to be forced to pay for it. I view copyright terms as extremely excessive and copyright itself a restriction on the freedom of information, and thus, immoral. So I'll do by best to pirate and avoid copyright laws... (simlar to what people do with taxes).

"A person in the US who, for example, wants to watch all but the latest season of Game of Thrones"

This is simply not true. In my experience, only the most mainstream content is available legally on portals like itunes or netflix. If you want to watch something more rare (art film, old foreign film, film with subtitles in different language) you can try to buy very expensive DVD+shipping and wait few weeks for it to arrive or you have to use illegal sources.

Much of humanity has no access to what you are talking about. Without torrents and sharing most of humanity will have no experience of Game Of Thrones.