just like everything in life, this will only pay off for the first few. Right now people are willing to pay to reward the artists who are willing to tell the RIAA/MPAA to piss off...but once everyone starts doing it, it'll revert to just the natural sales to the fans etc.
I honestly don't think the average, non-technical, sub-intellectual person puts that much thought into these things.
What is happening here seems pretty clear to me:
People are looking for entertainment, they are finding some on YouTube, they see an ad for more of the same enjoyment, they whip out their credit cards and pay for it.
If this story happened in a college dorm room and the entertainment-seeker's roommate had them all on DVD already, he would have said "Here, watch mine." If he had them all on his hard drive, he would have said "here, plug in my external".
It seems like people are simply following the path of least resistance.
Yeah. It's not a zero-sum game: on the Internet, people can see more and access more, and they can do it quickly and more effectively than they could in the past. So everybody wins.
