TheBoost said:

With POPA and PIPA and ACTA and what not going down, this seems a good time to discuss what do you steal online? How do you justify it... if you bother to justify it at all?

I download HDTV broadcasts and preservations (usually laserdisc ones) of films and TV shows that are not currently commercially available. Only very rarely do I download commercial Blu-rays, HD DVDs and DVDs.

My reasons for downloading preservations probably don't need much explanation. I don't want things that I like to become lost, I want to be able to watch them, and as soon as they became commercially available again I buy them.

I download HD broadcasts that have what I judge to be superior transfers/masters/encodings/whatever to commercial releases. Obviously this is done out of a desire to see films in the highest available quality; but the fact that there exists an alternative way of acquiring films that studios have DNRed, badly color timed or otherwise marred also affords a certain degree of satisfaction. It would be nice to believe that all films with poor releases will eventually be done justice by the industry, but this is hard to believe, and I think that the films themselves are more important than copyright.

Moreover, downloading broadcasts that anyone with the right equipment can access doesn't feel the same as downloading rips of commerical releases. If it's not legal to own copies of broadcasts why is it legal to sell set-top boxes that burn copies to disc? I suspect that many people who think that downloading broadcasts is wrong have done this and lent copies to friends, in which case the difference is simply the extent of distribution.