I download only things that either are free or should be free. To that end I download TV shows that were broadcast on networks I could easily have watched pretty regularly. I don't see the point of having a Tivo when downloading episodes of, say, smallvile works the same as recording it on Tivo and watching it a month later. If people are making these shows for free public consumption on the airwaves then paying 2 dollars an episode is pretty excessive. When they give me the option to watch it for free with ads I take it (ala Hulu) since then I am in part suporting their development costs, but if they do not my first inclination is not to give them 2 dollars an episode but rather to take the internet end around.
Music I sometimes buy from itunes and sometimes pirate. Music is a harder thing to justify in terms of paying huge ammount. After all lets say you steal a movie, that movie cost millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars to make. What's the most a song could have possibly cost to make? A few thousand dollars for studio time? With movies you're talking about hundreds of people even past the actors and directors (who I think are overpaid). I don't buy movies so brad pitt can get 20 million, I do it so the boom guy can get his 40k. If they keep raising the cost of admission to a theatre past 10 dollars and the cost of a DVD past 20 or 30 then that may change. There is only so much I'm willing to pay to do the right thing. Yah though, songs, its like 4 guys in a studio plus a producer, I don't feel bad at all downloading a Metalica song. Did you know most of the guys in that band have 5 houses? Lars' FOURTH house is a giant mansion right on the lake in Lake Arrowhead, screw that guy when he talks about how he needs the money and Napster is stealing.
When I do buy its bands that are original, interesting and need the money. I'll download Metalica (I don't think they're even ON Itunes anyway) but I'll def buy Panic at the Disco of Flobots. I use a need based test (in this case the bands need) and go see bands I like in live shows, which is a better way of compensating them anyway (since they get the money not just 10 cents on the dollar for albums while their greedy record labels take the rest).
For games there is no excuse for pirating. Noone is getting the 20 million brad pitt dollars there, its a studio full of Boom guys making 50-100k tops. Piracy is what is killing the PC industry and there is no excuse for doing it. I haven't downloaded a game and not paid for it ever with the exception of a few shareware titles I didn't like (and didn't buy the full version of after downloading the demo) and I don't think that counts.
Even though I hate Microsoft with a passion I didn't even pirate Windows though in hind sight I should have. I only use it on my mac because Microsoft made sure I had to with direct X being pushed as the proprietary games standard. They copied the mac OS in the first place after frauding their way into being given a prerelease 1984 mac. We really shouldn't be rewarding them with 300 dollars every OS upgrade (which again, lifts ENDLESS ideas from OSX and the open source community). After using Vista Ultimate a while I've become convinced that MS should be paying us users for dealing with how badly it sucks. If they don't let me downgrade it (been working on that with tech support for months) to XP I may have to pirate XP because theres no way I'm paying for windows twice.
PSN ID: ChosenOne feel free to add me
