Is it still pirating if you're paying for all the services that would otherwise support the media? In any given week, I download about 5 TV shows and a dozen anime. I still pay my $50 cable television bill (even though I never plug in the cable box, I literally don't watch TV at all), my $70 internet bill, a yearly subscription to Netflix and Hulu, and a subscription to Funimation. All together I pay around $170 bucks a month to watch a couple dozen short flicks.

Yet I download torrents of every single show I want to watch because I think the commercial and advertising industry is cancer. It ruined public television, it ruined private (cable) television, and it's ruining the internet. The entire industry is run by a couple hundred enormous companies that are desperate to stay relevant in a increasingly dynamic world. 23 minutes of commercials for a 37 minute TV show. Commercials and advertising from the same companies selling the same shit for as long as I can remember into my childhood.

I don't buy the 'but the commercials and advertisements pay for the show!' argument either. All the ridiculous licensing laws that prevent shows from being immediately available worldwide were created before we had an easily accessible worldwide internet. The ideas and practices of using region locking and delayed releases to create a "buzz" about a specific media is obsolete in an era when a message (or OC media, or "buzz") on the internet can go viral and spread worldwide in a matter of hours.

Charging $2-3 dollars for a TV show that costs roughly $20,000-$70,000 a show to produce would reap huge profits every single show (unless no one liked the show), taking the advertisement and commercial industry completely out of the picture. The few huge companies responsible for over a century of brainwashing brandmaking will have nothing of that.