You can never, ever, expect people to miss out on the culture that's happening during their lives.
If money, or geography, or whatever is preventing it, they'll still do the best they can to make sure they don't miss anything.
I live in Romania, and unfortunately for those a little older than me the '80s were pretty hard times, with us being on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain and living under a dictatorship. Nevertheless, people couldn't care less, they were still listening to Radio Free Europe for the latest "decadent" music charts, even though that could have meant their parents losing their State-controlled jobs or even going to prison.
So, yeah, trying to impose stupid barriers (be them real or virtual) has never worked and they'll never do.
The other thing I'd say though is that most people will still operate within their own moral code. In the UK technically platform shifting (transferring music from CD to MP3 for instance) is illegal but that doesn't stop anyone as people see it as a historic oddity and not something which is even remotely morally wrong.
It's not uncommon that the same people who will pirate movies from multi-billion pound businesses will also voluntarily pay when for donationware (or when Radiohead release an album) they could get for nothing.
There are two things we need to look at:
* Availability / technology and restrictions on the ability to obtain media - for instance I torrent because I can't get it legally.
* Why people's moral code does or doesn't allow them to take certain actions?
We're moving increasingly into a trust economy where from a technical point of view people can have what they want and it's almost impossible to stop them.
In that situation your ability to extract payment from them depends on your making a case for why it's reasonable (and indeed beneficial) for them to stump up in a world where the link between what something costs to produce and what it's reasonable to charge for it is a little less obvious than in the days of purely physical product.
I can see the argument for torrent over buy, but not really torrent over nothing.
But this (if it happens at all) will frequently be offset by those who pirate now but might become legitimate clients in the future. People in this category might be students (no cash at the moment but will have in the future) or those pirating just to see if they like something (one of the reasons home taping never killed music - because through compilation tapes you had people doing your marketing for you and finding you new fans). In this instance you not only lose nothing now but you're actually building product and brand awareness.
Certainly I'd say that effort put into stamping down on this might be better spent trying to convert people to real clients in the future.
The only other thing I can think of is whether there's any legal aspect whereby if you fail to defend your IP you lose rights. I believe that this is the case for trademarks but don't know if it extends. If it did it might mean that you had to put up at least a token fight.
Broadly it seems that the best strategy is just that - some relatively low barriers more as a reminder than anything else and then leave it at that.
Devil's advocate: You spend time consuming the thing you torrented instead of buying something that was legally available to you and consuming that instead. But yes, this is getting to "penumbric emanation"-level of arguing, though I think that the limited nature of your time is something that should be pointed out.
(Just to be clear and attempt to curb as many silly replies as possible: Just because it's true doesn't mean that I think it should be. Furthermore, your contrived circumstances wherein you turn the TV on and off at just the right moment to avoid seeing the ads is of no interest to me; besides being basically impossible to do properly, even most people doing other things during the commercials will be exposed to the advertising in some fashion.)
Recently, while in Germany, I found Youtube content to be highly restricted. I could not view music videos that I can view in Ireland, and I find this arbitrary restriction oppressive. I would imagine that others do too, and will just avail of whatever other means are available to them. Torrents and such are just filling a vacuum.
In Ireland none of the mainstream music streaming services (Spotify, Rhapsody) are available. Grooveshark is.