I may be a pirate, but if US TV companies actually gave me a choice to buy their programmes with some degree of timeliness, perhaps I wouldn't need to be.
But I am genuinely amused that people expect political correctness from people whose livelihoods they are probably disrupting unlawfully. (I chose my words carefully there).
It is especially interesting to hear this from a Cocoa developer, by the way, considering the rate at which Cocoa apps are pirated. (I'm not calling you a hypocrite; no, quite the opposite. "Suicidal" might be a better epithet here.)
Anyway, I wrote a book. It ended up on Scribd, Google Books, and the Pirate Bay. I still made plenty of money. Could I have made more? Maybe, maybe not. I certainly don't know what percentage of the pirates would have bought it had it not been available on TPB. My estimate is zero, which means piracy cost me nothing.
Piracy, in my opinion, is just a scapegoat for "nobody wants my crap anymore". Yeah, piracy happens. But even in the absence of piracy, it's possible that nobody wanted to pay $50 for a season of a TV show anyway.
This popularity seems to have been the big catalyst for trolls trying to make a buck, which means the whole blasted thing is deeply mired in a lot of people's long-term interests.
To me, this means the whole thing is going to be completely lacking a sensible view for decades -- both POV's that support "in the public good" (e.g. being able to use excerpts of copyrighted material for publication/research/etc, make digital backups of your property) as well as being compensated for the service (e.g. selling copies of your music to pay the bills so you can write more songs).
Yeah, I respectfully call bullshit on that.
There's a large group who consider paying for things to be a moral issue, paying even when they're not being monitored and the content is easily copied.
There's nothing I can do about piracy. The options are to either (a) treat it as the enemy and fight it or (b) accept the benefits it brings and write off the losses.
Judging by the progress the RIAA and co are having with option (a), I think option (b) is a far more rational alternative.
1. Legal: pursue copyright violators, possible DMCA claims against those who circumvent your protection scheme (if you have one)
2. Technical: build in DRM. If not, at least add forensic marking to allow you to track the source of your piracy to know if it's hurting actual sales or not
3. Social: stop propagating the meme that copying commercial data is ok because you are knowledgable enough to do so and it doesn't hurt anyone.
The RIAA has an uphill battle because of no option #2. (CDs have no DRM, despite efforts to retrofit it). They are trying #1 and #3.
Also, I have a counter-example to Felten's claims that DRM never prevented piracy. With BD+ (Blu-ray), we have had some discs survive 60 days before they were cracked. In that time period, there were no high-def rips available on Bittorrent of those movies.
While there are still no large studies showing how many potential pirates purchased a disc due to the delay in availability, I wholeheartedly disagree with "There's nothing I can do about piracy".
(Actually, piracy directly benefits my line of work, and nets some interesting intellectual challenges for me and my field, since it's driving plenty of businesses into the arms of DRM-style schemes. It will not surprise you to learn that I also believe the pirates are going to lose the technical battle over DRM in the long term, too. So, in behalf of everyone who enjoys writing kernel debuggers and hypervisors: thanks for the extra billable hours!)