[jrogers65]

This comment seems to make the assumption that something being illegal makes it wrong.

You can buy soft and hard drugs in your local supermarket, just a very small subset of them. Caffeine is used by almost everybody and it qualifies as a soft drug. Alchohol is used by the majority of the population and it is a hard drug. Tobacco is a soft drug in terms of psychological effects and a hard one in terms of it's physical impact. If the law is so irrational as to categorise many other soft and hard drugs as a danger, why should people not side-step it? What is the benefit of jumping off an intellectual cliff just because the majority of people are doing so?

Copyright infringement is based on similarly irrational laws. They are for the benefit of the few and harm society as a whole. Culture has traditionally been free to share. This brings the benefit of giving people access to materials which inspire thoughts and feelings that they might not otherwise come across. This, in turn, provides a greater probability of innovative and novel ideas coming about, which benefit everybody. Intellectual property has been described by many people as an oxymoron.

In my opinion, the questionable activities are not of those who use bitcoin to buy illicit substances or use Mega or Torrents to access cultural artifacts but of the governments who subscribe to the notion that these activities are negative and that violence must be used against those who participate.