[Taylorious]

I am 22. Back when I was a kid I torrented everything. Now I don’t pirate much at all. A previous poster hit the nail on the head, it’s all about time and money. When I was a kid I had no money and tons of time. Any money I was able to scrape together from part time jobs went to buying hardware and other things (bikes, musical instruments, etc.). Anything that wasn’t physical I just considered free for the taking. Not because I made up some moral crutch, I just couldn’t afford it and I wanted it. I don’t have a ton of money now, but I have a lot less time than I used. Two things spring up from this. Firstly, I desire a lot less content. I simply don’t have the time to play all of the games I used to play and watch all of the TV shows/movies that I watched as a kid. Secondly I don’t mind paying because now I have some spare money and there is a lot less content that I will be paying for. I think people underestimate the amount of children/jobless people who are using torrents.

People who have the money will pay for content if it’s presented to them in an attractive way at a reasonable price. I never pirate movies, because why bother? I can rent them from Amazon/Google for a few dollars or get them from a redbox that is a couple hundred feet from my apartment. I wait for TV shows to be on Netflix/Hulu, even though I might be behind a season or so but who cares? Same with movies, I don’t care anymore if I have to wait a year for a movie to go on amazon/Netflix/google. If I have to wait awhile or I forget about a movie and never see it then oh well the world still turns.

I do have to admit that I never pay for music though. I prefer to pay for live shows. To me music has always been free simply because of the radio. I know technically, it’s not because of advertisements, but that’s how it feels to me. That being said if I would be much more apt to buy music if I could buy it directly from the artist at a reasonable price (ie 5-10 dollars for an album), especially if the quality was high (320kbps mp3 or flac). That’s part of the reason why I don’t like mp3 services like amazon and itunes, the bitrate just isn’t high enough for me. I didn’t spend hundreds of dollars for nice headphones to listen to poorly encoded music, and I don’t live in the 90’s anymore so I’m not going to buy a cd.

In regards to ebooks, I think the belief that books are free has already been ingrained in culture due to librarys. Until I was an adult I never bought a book. Even now the only books I really buy are technical books. I rent everything else from the library. I don’t like ebooks, but if I did I would likely rent them as well.