No business can meet all demands. I think this is what annoys me the most about the "I pirate because I'm underserved" crowd. They act like not getting what you want is unique to our times. Unique to the internet. It's not. People in all walks of life, in all times, have had to deal with not getting everything they want. Had to deal with making compromises.
In this particular case Fred had several options to see the basketball game. He has season tickets. He could have chosen a different way to pay for television (I don't live in NY but I'm assuming it has DirectTV or Dish Network or some other option besides just Time Warner). He made the choice that he made, but was unwilling to accept the downside it came with.
In the business world we call these entitled customers. These are the types of people who bring back clothes 2 years after the purchase and get huffy when the store won't return them.
But in this case, it doesn't matter if the store accepts the return or not, he gets his money thanks to the pirates. When you are competing against free, it's bad business sense to turn away paying customers like this guy.
(The retail analogy is: this guy buys some clothes. He wants to return them, and you say no. The cash register opens and gives the guy his money back anyway. So you might as well take the clothes he's trying to return.)
People expect to be able to get stuff because they know it is available.
If each piece of TV/music/whatever had to be dug out of the ground, or hand-made, at great expense, they would not be available easily. People would want them, but hardly anyone would be providing them.
But that is just not the case here. These things are trivially available. It is that they are being witheld by certain providers -- because the whole market rests on a made-up artificial scarcity. That is the basic underlying physical fact, and people feel it.
If people expect to be able to easily get stuff that is actually easily available, they are absolutely right!
So really, his choice is to move into a building with a different cable provider and hope that provider doesn't get into a similar spat.
Then Zappos comes along and eats your lunch.
The fact is that this is an outdated business model that is still around solely because of govt control and interference. If these laws were changed, dozens if not hundreds of people from this community alone would be eating their lunch.
> No business can meet all demands.
Absolutely, but it isn't being met. The demand of universal access is being fulfilled elsewhere.
>They act like not getting what you want is unique to our times. Unique to the internet. It's not.
What's unique to our time and the internet is that I can get what I want and it's more convenient than the conventional way.
That's the problem I was trying to highlight, hopefully this doesn't come across as snarky.