This is a nice idea, but if you're going to pay money for content, doesn't it make a lot more sense to pay it to a legit publisher/distributor rather than a pirate?

Barring ethical and legal issues, no, not really; the pirates offer a better product. And in some places, they're the only providers at all.

Absolutely. The problem is, as always, convincing the legit publisher/distributor to sell you the product you want at a price you find reasonable.

Sure - providing you live in the US and you have a way to pay it to a legit publisher. Where I live, hulu/netflix/itunes are blocked.

Yes, but it seems the publishers aren't that interested in my money. While I do live in a country where I can at least watch Netflix, there's so much content that's not available to me due to artificial licensing constrains.

Piracy is not the answer, but perhaps the only way to get some people to realize that the world is changing.

You seem to have missed the point about coming out even. If you seed to give back you actually come out even or possibly ahead so you aren't actually paying in the long run. Of course that's also a bit of a pyramid scheme because it relies on someone else to be leeching in order to get your money back. If you happen to be one the last ones to watch a movie, or it's one that's been out a while so not many people are interested in watching you may end up net negative. It would have the disadvantage of discouraging people from watching anything but popular movies, of course it would also possibly encourage people to seed less popular stuff.

I pay for a private torrent tracker because it's impossible to get the content (tv/movies) I want. So even if I wanted to pay content creators, I can't. Having said that, I don't feel I'm pirating content simply because, as a consumer, I'm being ignored. So either way content creators wouldn't be getting my money.

Here's where a Proof of Bandwidth system like Bitcloud would come very handy. This way everybody is rewarded automatically in the same measure they contribute (ie seeding).

That would be perfect for a ratio-enforcement scheme that works cross-tracker.

I'm sure there would be ways to game it, but it could go a long way in ensuring the average user gives what they get. It would be awesome to integrate a 'currency' into a similar client, where you slowly earn more by seeding.

It seems like the ratio system most private trackers already have (and had before bitcoin)

I didn't suggest ratio because of how easy it can be manipulated. Cryptocurrencies solve that problem at least partially.

How would it prevent manipulation?

It wouldn't prevent in itself, but would help by providing unduplicable unit of account. Well, as I think now, it would be almost the same as simple ratio, because I doubt ratio cheating comes from manually editing ratio in database.

You just described how private trackers work. (Except the crypto-proof).

Except that ratio can be falsified easier than cryptocurrency and you can't use ratio for anything else but "buy" movies.