Originally Posted by Nautilus

I'm looking at this piece of shit "culture" landscape every fucking day of my life for the last year or two. I'm reading forums, comments at torrent and tube sites, and even comments at torrentfreak recently, so yes, I'm pretty damn familiar with the subject.

While I agree with you that convenience of getting everything at one place attributes alot to the illegal sharing sites' popularity, that's still far from being the main reason. My estimation is that 90% of the "free culture" crowd just wants shit free and do not mind surfing 20 different sites to get what they want (free of course). About 10% or even less are ready to pay for convenience of getting everything at one place (rapidshare or newsgroup subscription, that kinda things), but only at symbolic prices like $10/month or $50/year, and those prices are not life compatible for any creative industry.

For example, rapidshare is pulling laughable $80mil/year, and they provide download access to EVERYTHING, every little bit of human creativity ever created is stolen and uploaded to their servers. How can you sustain creativity of the entire human race - music, movies, software you name it, - at $80mil/year? Even if 100% of it goes to producers of the original content. Even $80 billion is not enough to produce all the stuff that is "shared" there, let alone $80 million. And they're not ever going to pull anything close to $80bil.

So if some services will pop up that provide access to huge variety of legal content at fair price (not nearly as "fair" as $10/month for everything though), free culture crowd is not going to migrate there. They'll stick to their sharing forums and go on as usual. Those services will be fairly popular, but only among the people who are not free culture crowd today - those who still buy paysites membership, download songs at itunes, rent movies at netflix etc. They will be interested, but free culture ppl will not.

Just read what they post at their forums - it is painfully obvious that they really believe that creative products grow on trees and are free for any one to "share", "sharing is caring" bs etc. They behave as if producers simply do not exist - "original uploader" is kinda producer in their world. They always bitch when there's not enough "thank you" after they posted some freshly stolen stuff, they often fly sigs saying "thank the uploader" because that's kinda etiquette in their communities - but they never ever thank the real producer of the shit they like. Never ever post a link back, never encourage to join site if you liked their stuff to help producing more of it. Nothing, ever. And they never ever going to join any of our sites because for them we kinda do not exist, and you cannot join something that does not exist. No download alternatives are going to change that - they'll get back to buying only after their forums and torrents and other crap is dead and buried.