| It doesn't seem to me that people enjoy pirating or not paying for goods. The ITMS volume or seeing how piracy in US has been declining steadily are good indicators. People go towards piracy when the system doesn't satisfy their requirements. Downloading a pirated movie is not as easy as it is to pay Netflix $10/month to have a vast catalog of instant streaming options. There is no comparative service that is free (legally or illegally). It's also argubly easier since you don't have to choose the format of the movie you are downloading or the encoder or several other options while being unsure wether it will play on your PS3 or XBox. If you create an intuitive and reasonable system for consumers to operate it's very likely that they'll stop looking towards a sub-par alternative like pirating things. A couple of examples: Why should I care, as a consumer, that Hulu hasn't reached a deal to stream some TvShows to my PS3 but did reach it for the Web site? It doesn't make any sense to anybody but those who profit from this. How can this be helpful? People got Hulu Plus with the idea that everything would have been available on the PS3 and then some more, but this wasn't the case. This is a frustrated consumer whose demand couldn't be met not because of lack of technical capability or just impossibility. It's really just because of obscure business deals that have nothing reasonable attached to them from a consumer point of view. The same could be said about music releases that are not international. What is the point of this? How is it that a UK consumer can listen to a given album while a US consumer can't (and vice-versa)? Provided both want to pay its full price. People go towards piracy as a last resort, not as a first step, it's almost a precious feedback mechanism that tells the market what people really want. You can of course dismiss all of this by simply saying that the consumer has no right to decide whether he agrees or not with the business decision. It's true, but that's not moving forward the discussion in any useful way. |