Reply #343: I think you have a false understanding of how life works in the information age. [View All]

[joshcryer]

Does one:

Work 8 hours a day to earn a paycheck to spend a small amount of it on internet and on digital media.

Or.

Work 8 hours a day to earn a paycheck to spend a small amount of it on internet connection which allows them to "illegally" acquire digital media.

It's a cost-benefit analysis. A lot of people "believe" it's cheaper to buy digital media from those stores that offer it, because the "effort" required to find that media via other streams is worth as much as working a few tens of minutes a day. ie, if I get paid $10 an hour, and I spend 30 minutes finding a file that is for sale for a dollar, my 30 minutes is worth $5 so by downloading something illegally I've 'spent' $5 as opposed to $1. But I'd argue that given the era of Google scraping almost every site on the planet, no file need take that long to find, and indeed, you'd spend about as much time as you might on any of those media selling services, only you won't have to pay in the end.