If the blender I bought doesn't work I should be able to take it back to store and get a refund. But just because I spent 30 minutes driving back to store, that doesn't mean I can just take another one from the shelves and walk out without paying.
If the blender I bought doesn't work I should be able to take it back to store and get a refund. But just because I spent 30 minutes driving back to store, that doesn't mean I can just take another one from the shelves and walk out without paying.
Even more so, the 99% profit margin isn't the whole story, as torrents are arguably more efficient (by making use of spare bandwidth among the populace). The 1% marginal costs for legally downloaded media primarily exists only because of the company's need to tightly control distribution and charge for access. With torrents, this requirement disappears and the marginal costs drop even closer to zero.
[1] I'm only counting bandwith costs here, which seems to be at most $0.05 per GB. This is what Google charges for their CDN traffic, so their internal costs per GB must be lower: https://cloud.google.com/interconnect/cdn-interconnect#prici...
Do while the legal system does not say he has a legally enforceable claim to watch the movie, the same system will not punish him for doing so.
Now, if we are talking morally, I'm going to guess we have different moral systems and thus not reach the same conclusion.
P.S. for the blender example, it would be more as if his purchased blender didn't work so he used a working one to turn his blender into a working copy, while the second blender continues to sit on the shelf for someone else to buy.