The Beatles, Star Trek, and everything made by DeMille should be in the public domain by now. It all should be free for the taking. A lot of what is on TPB should be legal. Much of what you get fed on broadcast and cable television should be PD.

That's the futuristic nightmare that Disney et al want to prevent.

My University paleo professor worked on those fossils.

I don't think he would describe them as "human".

The RIAA and MPAA are associations of middle men.

EXACTLY.

The "buy and rip" option is not a viable once since Big Content has sought to make that illegal.

They even went so far as to sue a company that sold overpriced DVD jukeboxes to billionaires. Even THAT product was declared illegal. If a billionaire with a 200 foot yacht has no hope, what does that mean for the rest of us.

Beyond Apple fanboys gleefully declaring you a criminal, there is also the fact that the ease of use of ripping solutions suffer due to all of that stuff being pushed underground.

During the 4th season, Bab5 was nearly canceled. This caused the story arc to be accelerated and also caused the last part of the season to be scrambled. It got put on at random obscure times.

That nonsense is what originally motivated me to get a PVR.

Sometimes you need a computer to keep up with the nonsense they do to the scheduling of some shows.

I would also like to point out that JMS never got his royalties for the Bab5 DVDs. So he should not be so quick to defend the status quo.

If you catch up on his stuff on DVD, there's no difference for him if you do it "legit" or via TPB. He really should know better.

That's it in a nutshell. We are in a golden age of consumer media. We are awash in a sea of stuff. Even if you don't pirate it, it is still dirt cheap. There are $5 DVDs. There are even $5 BDs. You can get an entire old show on disc for cheaper than you can see the cheesey new remake at the cinema.

Piracy is not the real problem. The back catalog is. A glut of content has led to brutal price competition and vicious price cutting.

It can be Hulu, or Netflix, or it can even by Frys.

TBP is simply a red herring.

...plus the randomly placed adverts.

At least the old school adverts were congruent with how the show was written. The flow of the plot actually accomodated the expectation that the show would be interrupted.

Hulu commercials are even more annoying than the original kind because they pop up in random places with no regad for where you are in the show.

After 10+ of using PVR technology, an unskippable commercial is like an unforgivable curse.

> If its on Netflix, why would I even bother to download the torrent?

Better quality. More of the original intact (like subtitles). Better player features (like navigation). Better availability both in terms of supported devices and "cloud networks".

If frustration with the Netflix player can drive me to BUY something then clearly it can drive 100 others to pirate it.

It's like that magical button that allows Google to stop piracy. Except this magical button allows you to destroy all of the copies owned by the copyright holder.

It's a lot like what the BBC did with old copies of DrWho but a bit more timey-whimey.