Section Ratio General

Harriet Porber the Trans Wizard comes to mind first. I love Chuck Tingle so much.

Direct downloads can’t be tracked in the way torrents can, as far as I know.

Yeah, lots of people are either terrible people, or have enough money to fund hate crimes, or are willing to act on their beliefs. Rowling is special because she is both a raving bigot, rich, and 100% willing to pour all her money into making sure no trans person feels safe again. You know, Morgoth’s Trinity: Resources, Hatred, and Will to Power.

I think you are equating capitalism to money changing hands instead of the generation of capital. The glib version of my argument is “Piracy drives word-of-mouth advertisement which drives sales, therefore piracy increases sales.” Its obviously more complex than that, but I hope you see my position.

Piracy is in a sense the purest form of capitalism. It costs slightly more than nothing to send a file over the internet, and so if the efficient market hypothesis was true everyone would be pirating all the time. The suits and the corpos know full well that their products compete with piracy’s offerings at the low, low price of free + a VPN or Usenet subscription or a 3D printer. The smarter corpos know that they can gague a market by keeping track of torrents of their movies/shows. We aren’t insulated from the free market down here just because we don’t pay for shit.