I'm curious if anyone here thinks it would be morally or ethically wrong to download all the movies that you've already paid for via bittorrent? I can't think of a convincing argument against it, other than being technically illegal.
i usually rent from a local library and use DVDFab & Handbrake/x264 to encode from scratch with excellent settings. Most of the stuff on torrent is lousy quality that's optimized for size first. The way I see it, i already pay huge property taxes that more than covers the few select movies i rip. sometimes i already own the DVD (720p) version but not the blu ray (1080p).
I can't comprehend how one would arrive at that reasoning.
definitely some mental gymnastics are required. the difference between owning and renting is largely inconsequential. i rarely watch the stuff i own, and since i can rent it for free from a library, i would never buy it. i just save myself a library trip the one time in 2 years that i want to watch it.
i guess i have little sympathy for ever-expanding media conglomerates, like Comcast-NBCUniversal, given how they've treated me as their loyal customer/prisoner for the past decade. i do pay for content from smaller studios, and as i said, most of the stuff i rip is older and i already own in crappier resolution on dvd.
That is, other people may have fair use claims to the access. So why should I be on the hook for uploading.
—yes, I know the position that RIAA takes on this. I just found it interesting seeing this from a different perspective.
If you can circumvent copyright just by not caring whether you have a right to copy, that's essentially the same thing as copyright not existing at all.