Pirate or not pirate?

Think about a long street full of bars and restaurants selling lots of different stuff. 

Also, imagine that it is a totally new place for you, somewhere far from where you live and it is not like where you live at all. Out of these places, only some of them offer paid food and drinks where as all the others are free. Moreover, in order to get the paid stuff, you should follow a couple of procedures that would take your time while the free ones are almost put on the sidewalk for you to quickly grab and go. 

Which one would you go for?

For me, the above is quite a good analogy with downloading stuff from internet. There are vast amount of "free" stuff floating on the net while only a number of paid sites with lots of restrictions, terms and conditions etc. The people then of course would choose the free content since, for them, it is exactly the same content but without any forms, registrations and most importantly, charges. 

This post does not intent to defend unlicensed(what does it mean for users?) downloading or copying. I use Spotify, Lovefilm, kindle books myself which are all paid services. I am quite comfortable with them, think that they are quite affordable for what they offer and encourage you to use them.  

However, I can’t blame the people who are downloading stuff for free and I don’t agree with those who label them as pirates, thieves or whatever. The thing I want to stress is that the people downloading free stuff does not necessarily have to know the source and legal condition of the stuff (ie.licensing).In addition, if you think that the environment people are on is  “internet”, which most of the people are still having difficulties to understand and use, then accusing them would not make any sense at all. 

So my conclusion phrase would be: “The target should be the content distributors, not the downloaders!”