Is piracy a necessary evil?

[Lemur]

Pet peeve for me is when people confuse delivery platforms with piracy.

For example, I work for a media company, and sometimes we need to distribute HUGE files. Bittorrent is a lovely tool for this, especially if the distribution needs to be across a large organization/more than one organization.

Likewise, when I want to download a large mod such as DarthMod Empire, or a multi-gigabyte Linux distro, torrenting is reliable, convenient, and doesn't cough up blood if I need to pause it.

So ... yeah. Please don't confuse a platform with an activity. FTP does not equal piracy. Torrenting does not equal piracy.

And to go vaguely back on-topic:

Piracy will always be with us. But as Netflix has demonstrated in market after market, a cheap and convenient alternative will put a massive dent in the problem.