Studios and all assume that people are thieves.
There are a number of cases to think of:
Tim Ferriss teamed with.. BitTorrent to distribute his latest book (4 Hour Chef). He wrote a detailed article on his experience and the correlation between BitTorrent downloads and sales (number driven he is, he tracked that real-time).
The model was the second-shareware model of early DOS games (you get part of the content, and if you like it, you buy the rest). And people bought it. There was an ad on BitTorrent clients. I haven't bought the book yet, but I haven't even downloaded the free content since I'm saving the thing for later.
There was Radiohead releasing "In Rainbows" as a "Pay what you want" which is extremely risky (since you're giving all the content). And yet, I'll let the reader look up the numbers (it ended being pretty lucrative, since a lot of people pre-ordered it).
Studios and Publishers seem to forget that a lot of human beings would pay if it were easy. One of the reasons I got a MasterCard recently is to pay for books I've read. I live in a country where English isn't spoken, so there's no way I can find them in libraries, I tried to buy on Amazon, they told me they can't ship it where I live.
Second: It's ridiculous to expect of me to buy a movie I haven't watched, or a book I haven't read.
Bear in mind that even with content so easily to be pirated, most movies, and I mean like 99% of them, I wouldn't waste bandwidth to download them. I swear that I wouldn't even watch them if I were paid. Why ? Because a movie is 1h30 to 2h minimum and my life is made of hours and minutes and seconds. I don't like to waste my time. It's not like I'm immortal.
So most movies are crap to being with, not everyone is De Niro.
An other reason: Content is hardly accessible the legal way because their platforms suck big time. I give an example ?
Say there's an interview on NBC or CNN (though free).. I wouldn't watch it on CNN or NBC, because their site is so slow, their players are horrible you want to punch your laptop. So I go to Youtube and find that video and watch it without a glitch.
So I wouldn't even watch free content on the platform of the provider of this free content, because his platform sucks !
If your website is straining someone's computer's resources and making the fan go crazy, you got to ask yourself tough questions (and probably fire some people).
I gladly pay for things. I donate on random websites just because I want to, or because I liked something, or because they had a funny thing, etc.