on to suggest in a P.S. that people who work harder than the filmmakers -- the hardworking middle class -- don't see a million dollars in their entire life, and these filmmakers earn many millions off of a film in a few months' or years' time, so "I wouldn't buy the film even if I had money to spare just to keep the rich from getting richer." All this only sheds more light on the complex role of rationalization in a modern, digital, capitalist society. If you have this thought, maybe your, as you wrote yourself, "predictable shift of feelings" prevented you -- just in this moment -- from seeing the new state of technology, the new area of a connected society and information age, that is completely different to the media world we had 20 years ago. It's not about telling anybody to not download anything illegally, it's about building new services and products that make illegal downloading behavior obsolete (think Spotify and Kickstarter, not "lawyer"), it's about finding new business models for the people who create content. In a world of information abundance, the problem of an author shouldn't be if his books are illegally downloaded, his problem should be if he is texts are read at all. Attention is the scarce good now, not the access to information. So if an author, musician, artist has the attention of an audience. Maybe it's for many a concept like Kevin Kellys "1000 true fans" ( http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2\\... ) , maybe