Arrgh, There Be Pirates About

     So, when enjoying a social visit with some esteemed associates, an interesting moral question arouse today, to pirate or not to pirate?  That is the question.
     Sorry for the wordiness, I've been watching a little too much Shakespeare today, on media I purchased through a retailer.  The quality was good enough to really suck me in.  Which is my first point.  Who really wants to pirate material when the quality is almost always diminished?  Any one who goes through the trouble of ripping the content for pirating usually doesn't care what the other person gets, so the quality usually sucks for pirated downloads.
     Unless your are part of a new and emerging group of pirates.  The rent-it-once-and-watch-it-forever pirates.  This group of pirates usually has a decent home computer, with a DVD, or even sometimes a Blu-Ray burner, and rips the disc straight off onto their computer.  These pirates have brought high-quality content into the mix.
     But this creates a terrible paradox.  Because good content is so easy to get for free, yet good content is so expensive to produce, we are beginning to see a world where the quality of our media is deteriorating as our ability to view it is becoming more high tech, with higher quality, and faster speeds.   So, now the real question is, do you support these efforts that undermine the quality of your own media experience?  The original title of this post was going to be simply 'DRM', as that was what brought this up in my discussion with friends.  But isn't it terrible that things have come to that?  Where companies are so paranoid about people stealing content that they've gone off the deep end and locked everything down tighter than Fort Knox.
     You know, there was a time when there was no DRM, and you could buy something on electronic media with out worrying about it.  Now I'm not saying I fully support the big corporations in their endless zeal to take your money, sometimes even more than once for the same product, but I do understand how they want to get paid.  A lot of people have worked hard to produce the things you watch and read and hear, and honestly, isn't that what pay people for, hard work?  So, in this seemingly failing entertainment industry, maybe all we need is a little honesty, on the part of both parties.  Unfortunately the only thing we can fix is ourselves, and hope that everyone else follows.