Since when diversifying your operations is"loing focus"? Kodak focused too much in their film division. Look at what happened to them.

And students shouldn't be warezing stuff and downloading music and movies.

Argentina and the Condor missile is another example.

You beat me to it.
But in all honesty, the UK had their missiles up Paris' ass so there wasn't much they could do about that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGnTW8EhGSk

Antisocial much?

Just grab the damn phone.

Also, I forgot to answer your question: yes, I wouldn't bother pirating. I have a netflix account - still on the free month, and I'm analyzing wether I'll keep it or no. Probably I won't, since most of these movies I can watch on cable (which I'm already paying for).

Actually cable gives me newer movies and series (I get to see The Walking Dead 2 days after the US release. Why would I even bother downloading it?). Maybe i'm just the kind of people that likes to surf the channels and land on random programs... which is exactly what I do.

The point is that solutions are only halfway there. Netflix here in Argentina is only available for a very small fraction of people. For starters, it requires a credit card. Everyone has a credit card, right? No, you'd be surprised how uncommon credit cards (actually the Visa/Mastercard/Amex trio) are outside the "first world". Is there an option for all these people to pay? No. Do they bother searching for an option? Hell no. Prepaid cards? Payment places (where people go pay their bills)? No. Pay at a bank? No. Pay with your cell phone? No.

So it's a situation where people can't access stuff. Not that they don't want to pay for stuff -- hell, people actually pay money for ringtones! Why? Because it's as easy as sending a text. If you could watch a movie and pay for it with a text message, i'm sure a LOT of people would jump right in.

Well not every block, but video rental stores are still around.

Netflix only offers old movies here in Argentina (the newest i've watched there is "Superbad"), and hulu isn't available outside US.

I know plenty of people here who like to pirate because they DON'T want to pay for stuff. They'd rather download a movie in parts from a file download service (disconnecting from the internet every now and then to renew their IP address and jump the time limits) and spend days doing this rather than walking even 1 block to a video rental store and pay $2 to watch the movie.

This was true when internet was 512k and downloading a movie took more than a day.

There are people who just don't want to pay for stuff - sadly, this "conveniency" piracy makes it too easy for most people to think "this is how things should be", and convince themselves that "free" is the only acceptable price. Piracy here is the norm, not the exception. We have VOD services, and Netflix and most people I showed netflix to just laugh at you for paying $8 a month to watch movies "you can gef for free".