Living in a developing country like India , I see the PirateBay more like Robin Hood , not that they're right in what they do but sites like TPB are how most of us ever get to see most classic films , TV series and learn how to use tools like Photoshop. It's not like many people here can actually afford most of the stuff they pirate so noone really loses.

You don't even have to live in a developing country, some of the only ways to access one tv show is to pay a £15+ per month subscription to say Sky or Virgin so that you can access a small majority of tv shows when they air.

Canistream.it is a good example of all of the services you need to watch movies, and that's just movies not music.

Piracy will still be a large problem because it's either to expensive to access or you need lots of services to access all of the content, of course there are people who never pay for anything and will continue to do so even if easier to access and cheaper but I think they will be a small majority.

Why can't stuff be priced according to the purchasing power parity of that country. A lot of this stuff is simply over priced by our standards.

> Why can't stuff be priced according to the purchasing power parity of that country. A lot of this stuff is simply over priced by our standards.

Disclaimer: I am a proud pirate.

Generalizing, rightholders don't care. They regard intellectual property as pretty much analogous to physical property. They don't have to sell you something if they don't want to, and they don't have to sell something they're selling at a price point amenable to you. They regard the idea that somehow people are "owed" media content at a price reasonable to them to be an example of a sense of supreme, titanic, piratical entitlement. Can't afford it? Don't watch|listen|use it, then.

Well people have gotta make a living right?

Steam already does this to a certain degree but a lot of people from the higher paying countries are abusing it to get cheaper games.

> Pirating movies, music, software and so on strikes me as a mostly selfish act

Well, it is. Just like any form of protest. When copyright is 14 years again, and when content will be available on a buy-once-for-ever, lend-to-friends, inheritable, anywhere-in-the-world basis, I'll start paying for movies and music again. In the meantime, I'll just buy stuff from the independent artists I like to support them.

> When copyright is 14 years again, and when content will be available on a buy-once-for-ever, lend-to-friends, inheritable, anywhere-in-the-world basis

In the U.S., all but the first thing is true today for the vast majority of media. Some is encumbered in objectionable ways. And you have the option of buying almost any media in a way that makes it not really yours. But nobody is making you do any of these things.

If you want to buy a movie or album, you can go buy it on a disk. Problem solved.

(I see that you also say "anywhere in the world" but I'm not sure what you mean by this. If you were happy with copyright law in your country, why would objectionable copyright laws abroad justify disregarding fair laws at home?)

I'm from Slovenia, and we don't (didn't, maybe) have access to things like iTunes, Google Play, Netflix, ... Now I'm in the UK, but I imagine that if I bought a Netflix/Spotify subscription and went abroad (e.g. to Slovenia), it would stop working. So I prefer to download movies. For music, yes, you can buy mp3s from e.g. iTunes, so it's less of a problem.

Spotify premium works abroad afaik

Last time I checked, they had some confusing restrictions... Like you can't download stuff, or can only download so much, so when you're abroad without a free 3G connection, it's basically useless. Maybe they've changed it, though.

Until they remove the music you wanted to listen to.

> Well, it is [selfish]. Just like any form of protest.

Not always - for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Apartheid_Movement#A_cons...

The health of high-bandwidth, distributed systems of content delivery is a vital part of resisting censorship.

and what about the injustice of governments (at least in Europe, don't know elsewhere) that make you pay extra-taxes on any digital support with the excuse that people use them to store pirated material.

I'm pretty pissed off that I have to pay this tax despite storing only legitimate material, but not enough to do something directly. I cheer if someone else is fighting against the way the copyright industry works right now.

Living in the Netherlands, I used to be fine with this. It used to be that you'd pay a bit extra for storage media, but that piracy was tolerated. Downloading, that is. But recently the government caved to EU influences and now downloading content is also enforced to be illegal, yet the storage media taxes remain.

>... pay extra-taxes on any digital support with the excuse that people use them to store pirated material.

That's not what the blank media levy is for. It is a compensation for the right copyright law gives you to copy works you bought in one format to a different format. Think buying conversion of an audio CD into mp3 for listening in your car.

Not that the real justification makes sense, but please stop associating it with piracy: it is wrong and serves to perpetuate this levy.

>Think buying conversion of an audio CD into mp3 for listening in your car.

How is it a "right" if I have to pay extra for it?

wow. that's even worse.

and i wonder if companies continue to receive that free lunch even after they inflict DRM on their customers.

The blank media levy may well be unfair, but I don't see how enabling or engaging in widespread piracy helps fight against that. It probably does the opposite, given the rationale behind such taxes.

having learned to code in a place were a copy of the OS and the most basic compiler was ten times my parents income, i can see how that helps a little.

i do try to pay back my youth of buccaneering shame by always trying to send a patch with any big report to open source projects

*bug report

You have never lived in a country where there are no legal options.

That's true. But to clarify, I wasn't making any claim about the ethics of piracy, just the motivation behind doing it.