The failing [of the OP] is probably fixable with one word.....
"ALLEGED"
If the bloody site is illegal that is the end of discussion.
If, however you wish to dispute whether a site is correctly labelled as 'illegal' or not....yer gonna have to find another thread because this one was screwed by its own wording from the outset.
I'm not real stuck on what a grossly ignorant thread starter decides to use for wording, bothering with such trivialities is even more pointless than posting on this stuff to begin with.
But if 95% of the torrents are illegal they should just be let go?
Lets ignore all the technicalities. They go both ways, they're a bunch of bullshit for the most part, they vary by country, etcetera. Lets just assume that TPB is 95%(or higher, I don't give a red rats ass) illegal with no arguments in any direction over whether a particular file is really legal, or whether referencing an illegal file is legal, any of that nonsense.
Instead of the legality of it, because law is a construct and largely irrelevant to the reality of them, look at the effects. Copyright owners like to argue that intellectual property should be equally inviolate as physical property, but you can't buy up all the land around an airport and wait for Uncle to expand it and ream them for ten times the property value. They'll take it for less than you could actually sell it for typically. The reason being, there are situations where property control can be devastating to the population. You're not allowed to set your house on fire either, you could burn out your neighbors as well, property control is limited because it can be dangerous to individuals.
There are old movies and TV shows rotting away in a vault somewhere because their copyright owners are either too stupid or too greedy to take advantage of their asset. There's really good shit out there you've never seen since it originally aired all because the man with the rights to it is a moron. Billions in assets rot away every year as old flicks you'll never see degrade beyond use without ever having been transferred to a new medium.
Enterprise. Voyager. The killer B's whored out Trek for how many years? Even DS9, a good show in it's own right. Was that really Trek? Do you know what would have happened to DS9 if the old man still owned his own copyrights? We can go back further, Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Bad Gene Roddenberry! Since I'm an equal opportunity asshole, I'll pick on Star Wars too. Well, that's not true, I'll pick on Star Wars because I want to cut his nuts off with a dull butter knife and bleed the asshole dry for the Crimes he perpetrated with his editing job on the remastered releases. I could even forgive Jarjar with enough time, but softening Han Solo down to a wimpy little shit that waits for the bounty hunter to shoot first instead of blowing him away from under the table without warning? The character made the series, and he goes and ruins it.
It goes further, there will never be another Alice In Wonderland. That's not to say there wont be yet another rehash of Alice In Wonderland, because Alice In Wonderland predates the butchery and is one of the few things available to be rehashed. The copyright on this wonderfully inventive, and frequently played upon work expired in 1907. That expiration is why there are video games, movies, tv shows, plays, commercials, a nearly endless supply of alterations and extrapolations off that original work. Star Trek will never go out of copyright, you have to get permission to use it and will in the future as long Uncle keeps extending them to keep works covered in perpetuity. Roddenberry is already dead. Star Wars will never go out of copyright either, although we at least get decent video games for this IP. I only wish Lucas was dead, but it keeps me warm on cold nights so it's not a total loss.
A lot of people are one hit wonders of a sort. They can pull off an idea once, but they can't keep it going. Copyright kills their work as they suicide it into oblivion with fuck up after fuck up until you can't stand thinking about it. Other people are just really stupid, and don't ever release their copyrighted work. Then there are those wonderful monolithic corporations that run things into the ground in place of the original author, like Paramount did with Trek.
TPB isn't doing anything for the one aspect, the more damaging aspect unfortunately, but if places like that aren't shut down you'd have to worry a lot less about your favorite TV show dissappearing for the next thirty years because the producer doesn't like boxed sets or something. It's irrefutable fact that piracy builds markets in developing countries as well. The entry barrier into the information age is vast if you actually pay for it all up front. When you're getting all the software aspects off TPB, the hardware makes a lot more sense. We'd be a few years back in tech without the developing world stealing all the software to use on the hardware they could barely afford in itself.
It's also built markets in not so developing countries too. I don't know if the Japs have actually figured it out and will replace them as they wipe out their own market creation, but Manga and Anime would have a product viability of zero. You're just not going to sell adult yanks a black and white comic they have to read backwards at a ten pages a buck. It doesn't even matter whether the product is worth it or not, reaching the shelf wont happen in the first place without a few million people "stealing" them after they "stole" some anime subtitled by an enterprising pirate and thought "wow, saturday morning cartoons really suck!" I don't quite follow the progression, since broadened my horizons when Hulu started rattling out shows, but Hulu wouldn't likely exist either, and it didn't ten years ago in any case.
Copyright law has gone way past beneficial and into the lethal realm. Is piracy any worse? I keep waiting for some enterprising asshole to do a real study of their customer base to find out just how many of their actual paying customers are pirates first, but no one seems to want to know that detail. This is particularly hilarious since they're so frequently doing that very activity, minus the "piracy" entry in the form. I expect the reason is they're worried they'll find out the reverse is true. Rationality rarely wins over the need for control since corporations are running the show instead of the actual content creators, they're managed by a population subset similar to politicians. You're looking at a group that has natural and necessary predilections towards power acquisition, being driven by something else and becoming a Fortune 500 company just isn't likely.
