Here's an example from a few years ago I still use. When the Harry Potter movie #6 came out, I wanted to watch movies 1-5 a few days prior. I already owned 1-4

Here's an example from a few years ago I still use. When the Harry Potter movie #6 came out, I wanted to watch movies 1-5 a few days prior. I already owned 1-4 on DVD, but needed #5. I could not find it. iTunes, Netflix, and other streaming services didn't have it. Stores were sold out. I did spend more time than I thought it deserved trying to find a way to pay for this content. Then I gave up and torrented it. The kicker? iTunes removed the movie about a week before this. My other random perspective on torrenting/piracy is this: the industry will often use the price of the digital good * number of downloads as the figure for the loss of profits. However, this gives them way too much credit. They don't have the magic oracle or the distribution system to price each sale individually so as to extract the maximum amount of money from every buyer (Alice thinks the movie is worth $6.82 while Bob thinks it's worth $9.13). I argue that if there is a million downloads of a movie off a torrent site, that does not mean a million lost sales. I imagine it's closer to 0 than 1m. Basically, if most of the people downloading the movie couldn't get it for free, they simply wouldn't pick that particular movie.