Re: You make an excellent point here.

Most of the piracy worldwide comes from countries where spending cover price for media is too expensive for the majority of the population. The old models of distribution work fairly well in the developed world. They are doomed to fail in middle and low income countries - which comprise like 3/4 of humankind. So no, for the most part it isn't "piracy or the approved legal medium" ; it's "piracy or nothing".

This also reveals a cognitive dissonance regarding KP. If free downloading of legal content harms producers by denting their profits; how come we don't allow free downloading of KP, you know, so we dent KP producers' profits and harm them? Ah, suddenly they change their tune don't they?