Let’s say you’re not about to pay $30 for the Blu-ray edition of Blade Runner or Transformers, especially after you’ve already seen the film a dozen or more times on regular DVD. But now that The Pirate Bay, as far as I’m concerned, long gone, what are you gonna do? Will its “reboot” cause you to change your pirating ways, or will you merely move on to the next service and/or Web site?
Back when Napster was shut down, in 1999, there was no such thing as the iTunes Store. At the time, you couldn’t legally download the latest Hit_Album; Napster was a service all to itself. That’s not the case now, in the year 2009. Services like iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, and whatnot make it easy to watch or listen to plenty of content, 100 percent on the up and up. So, if The Pirate Bay does, indeed, go away, you actually have the option of going legit, an option that didn’t really exist ten years ago. But will you?
Me? I’d probably buy a Kindle and read books in my free time. Books > movies.