I’ll put it this way: TPB is the AOL of the torrent community. Have fun with your rootikits and malware.

In the case of music, it’s quite a bit better. There, the way I use pirate channels is very beneficial for the content creators. I download because I would never pay money for an album that I couldn’t listen to in full, repeatedly, on my own terms beforehand. But if I like it, I buy it. And I can do that because the physical copy I get at a record store is worth its money, and even for digital downloads there are increasingly many distributors whose offers are worthy: Bandcamp, 7digital, eMusic, HDTracks, etc.

In contrast, see films or TV. I would gladly pay a subscription fee to watch my TV shows legally, in a format and quality as good as that found through file-sharing. The thing is, I can’t. There is no legal way to acquire the content. Those ways that would exist but I can’t access due to senseless regional restrictions, are nowhere near the user-friendliness and quality of pirated versions.

In other words: the sensible, long-term solution is not to make pirated copies harder to find, but make the legally licensed copies available in a sensible way, so that those from shady channels automatically disappear further down in the results for being, well, shady.

Disney has a long history of using public domain stories as the basis for its movies, yet it has never contributed a single thing to the public domain for others to use. How is that fair?

Why is it that I can put up an antenna and watch network TV shows completely for free (I’m in the US), but if I download those shows from the net, I’m a filthy pirate? Note: I never watch the commercials anyway.

Why is it that music licensing, which is supposed to help artists, actually takes money away from them by making it prohibitively expensive for companies to license all the music used in old shows so that they can’t release it on DVD? Not to mention that keeping the shows off DVD also doesn’t benefit the people who made those shows either.

Maybe when copyright laws are scaled back to something resembling the original intent of copyright, people will start to respect them again.

did you see the man in the gorilla suit?

If you didn’t get the reference, do some digging. Suffice to say by your argument alone, you are demonstrating my point for me.

“That means the existance of the movie can be objectively verified, no magic needed.”

Point being that it can not. You can never separate, objectively, the information from the media. End of story.

Your argument once again drops all the way down to religion and intangibles. That is not a good start when the debate is about what part of a DVD you own or not.

Especially so since copyright law in itself expressly acknowledges that the bought DVD is in all aspects the property of the purchaser.

Bobmail fails on the basis of straight fact. And your argument fails as irreconcilable with observable reality. Especially so since what you tried to put as example has no bearing at all, nor relevance, to the topic of “ownership”.