personally, the use for bittorrent is long tail, niche software that has become obsolete and is no longer viable commercially and therefore not available.

the idea of the few people that have it being able to share it with the many that may eventually need or want it, is something that the centralised "cloud" based services cannot compete with.

so you may think there's no virtue, but there is in spades. you are blinded by your own piracy.

That's the theory. Turns out, though, that anything that's not really popular is hard to get hold of on TPB. It's usually easier to get hold of obscure content commercially.

> It's usually easier to get hold of obscure content commercially.

Unfortunately, your definition of osbscure depends on where in the world you're located. iTunes don't provide the same catalogue in the US and the UK or Ireland, Netflix don't provide the same catalogue. BBC documentaries are freely available in the UK online, but extremely difficult to get in Ireland without buying a physical copy, and up until last year, I didn't have a DVD or Blu ray player in my apartment

it's a fact not a theory in my experience. your experience differs. big deal, fact is - it works for me - it has virtue, the fact that it didn't work for you does nothing to change that.

also i infer from the immediacy with which you changed from niche obsolete software, to "obscure content" leads me to conclude you are talking about ripping off producers of low volume content who are still in business - again - blinded by your own piracy.

Yeah, that's fair. I guess it's different for software.

Hollywood is just the testbed. If you can transmit Hollywood stuff to the masses without a way for them to stop you, then you can transmit other more important information when the time comes.

Tinfoil much?

So the guy ran a website which greatly increased the chances of him going to jail, while at the same time being hardly the best way to increase his personal wealth (even just switching to a "locker site" would be much more profitable).

It's fine to think it's wrong, but why is that so hard to believe he's sincere, and not just "pretending"?

Just because someone's sincere doesn't mean he's not an idiot. Just because something doesn't make a profit doesn't mean it's virtuous. The Doom floppies I gave out in high school didn't make me a profit (I only charged as much as the floppies cost), but that didn't make it virtuous.

Which I don't see why everyone thinks TPB was a non-profit. They were pulling in hundreds of thousands a month via ads, way more than their costs, I would think. But we won't know, because there was no transparency.