> The first is TV series. I like a couple of TV series that are produced and first aired in the US. Things like Lost, House, Heroes. I could download these just hours after an episode is shown in the US, or i could wait anywhere between 6 months and infinity until it gets shown here in The Netherlands. Buying a DVD boxset is another option, but then I will have to wait until the season has ended.

This is a classic example of a type of piracy that the studios are totally capable of solving for themselves. Instead of counting up all the downloads and assuming them to be lost sales, then bringing those numbers to the justice department and lobbying for legislation and DRM and hiring lawyers and applying international political pressure and hiring consultants to formulate anti-piracy publicity campaigns...(deep breath)...the studios could, you know, MAKE THEIR CONTENT AVAILABLE TO YOU TO BUY.

This is also a classic example of why an illegal download doesn't necessarily translate to a lost sale. By the time the product becomes legally available, the market window has passed.

I'm not going to say that the above *justifies* illegal downloading. But let's say a car dealer leaves all the cars on his lot unlocked at night, with all the doors open and keys inside. No, it's not right to steal from this dealer. But it's hard to feel sorry for the guy when his cars do get stolen, and he's an idiot for wasting government resources in pursuit of a legal crackdown when he could, you know, just lock up at night. It's not a perfect analogy, because you can't lock up content (and attempts to do so fail), but it's accurate in that the simplest solution is to remove the incentive to steal.

> The second reason is that the practice of sharing things is a very human activity. Now usually sharing has a benefit (rise in status, just to make yourself feel good, etc) since it also has a cost.

That's a really interesting point on the psychology of why people do this. Although BitTorrent is, by itself, largely impersonal, there IS a sense that someone else is giving you something, rather than that you're downloading something from a machine.

I was reading an article recently about why the movie industry is not being very agile about shifting to a distribution model that works in the Internet age. I've linked to the article below; note that it isn't until the second half of the article that he gets to the real point.

The (unstated) conclusion I derive from the article is that the distribution system for movies is NOT going to change until it starts costing the studios more money that it already thinks it's losing, because only then will there be the incentive to stand up to all the different and powerful distribution outlets and insist on change.