Your counter is full of holes, I think, and you cannot simply dismiss in parenthesis the thousands of dollars lost by consumers whose access to music has been revoked when several online music stores went out of business; that's not reasonable. We've seen time and again that the RIAA and the MPAA actually do appear to be hell-bent on fucking consumers over with their lawsuits and while I dislike calling anything evil, the actions of law firms and content companies come close enough to make me uneasy.

As an example of a hole, none of your post addresses the point made in the article that it is often impossible to get the culturally-relevant thing that you want legally, whereas it is easy to get it illegally. Take the example of "Lost" that was given.

It is credible to make the claim that Lost was a piece of culture that was unique to the time that it was shown; it was a topic of everyday conversation and its cultural significance has diminished over time. What made Lost valuable and interesting was being a part of the community that watched Lost, in a sense. With the internet, one can reasonably claim that the community was global. If you are relegated to watching Lost several months after it has been seen (and discussed) elsewhere, the value of watching Lost is considerably lower. The artistic merit of the show was the tension of the story arc, I think, and the opportunity to discuss it with friends, colleagues and strangers.

When the blogger tried to follow the legal method of watching Lost, the behaviour of the content distributor ruined it completely. They delayed the showing so that he missed the global hype and destroyed the program by means of an advert for it in the middle of the program itself!. This is so ridiculous that it is almost kafka-esque. Had the blogger obtained the program illegally, its value to him would have been much higher regardless of his financial outlay.

The point of the original blog is not just that piracy is cheaper, more convenient and typically of low consequence. The point is that piracy allows you to participate in global culture events and results in a much better quality product.

You cannot equate this to stealing gasoline at all, I'm afraid. The loss of any resources as a consequence of piracy is debatable, which it is not in the case of a physical good. More importantly, gasoline is a commodity; stealing it does not improve the product. Whilst piracy results in a better-quality, more timely product, it will remain popular. The reason the legal services offered by iTunes and Netflix are so popular is nothing to do with their pricing models and everything to do with the quality of the product, i.e. the size of their libraries and that the media within the libraries are of sufficiently high quality.

Your last paragraph as a call-to-action is somewhat misplaced. There have been startups in this space that have been killed by the behaviours of the content companies themselves. Whilst others do appear to be succeeding (not just content distributors but content creators, which is fantastic), that takes a lot of time and is not something for which we can out the cultural participation of tens of millions of people on hold.