Well, but that's exactly what I'm talking about - P2P
does provide a really useful service, and I use it, too, for the same reasons. It's just that all things considered, I'd rather pay somebody to do it for me, especially given that NetFlix is ridiculously cheap for the convenience it gives me.
P2P is free in terms of money, but it's not at all free in terms of the effort you have to put into it to get reasonable, useful results. I don't want to do that; I have other things to do with my time and the time in my life when I liked ferreting out the dark corners of the world passed long ago (in my case, it was discovering that our stereo's radio band selector could cause it to pick up shortwave when positioned correctly - that summer, I learned that the Soviet Union was a paradise for academics and artists).
I don't have the time to find the right trackers, and there's the ever-present danger of the RIAA sending me a nastygram - or, as happened before I turned on security on my WiFi, sending my ISP a nastygram about movies downloaded. That sucked. This neighborhood is dirt poor, and I didn't mind sparing some bandwidth, but if my ISP is forced to turn me off if I don't police it?
That's the hassle of P2P, unfortunately. My beef is that if the RIAA were roughly as intelligent and mature as my 11-year-old, I'd be able to keep my WiFi open and buy movies online for reasonable amounts of money.
So when an otherwise excellent article like this slips in an incorrect assertion about evil pirates without justifying it, that really burns me. There are perfectly good business opportunities that the "rightsholders" (god how I hate that word) are too fat and lazy to take advantage of - but plenty of lawyers.