“Piracy”, in the intellectual property sense, tends to have a regulating effect. If people enjoy a work enough, they tend to want to own their own copy — preferably a copy presented in the best possible quality. That’s why people buy DVDs after seeing a movie or watching a TV show, and that’s why “free samples” exist. You’d have a much harder sell by avoiding the initial courtship and just asking people to buy an entertainment product, sight unseen. To an extent, the idea is kind of ludicrous.

The downside from a marketing perspective is that if people don’t enjoy a work, and they know that ahead of time, they tend not to buy it. As a result you get these interesting effects where, say, Brittney Spears loses sales to “piracy” because people don’t consider her music worth paying for, and smaller, more interesting bands are often “made” by “piracy” because people who might like the band’s music are able to hear it, hang onto it, and judge it over an extended period.

From what I can see, the only way this could be a bad thing is if you’ve invested a ton of money in something culturally vapid, and you expect your dividends nonetheless. I’m sure the natural balance of the universe would feel powerfully unfair in that instance, and you’d be tempted to lobby the government to draft all kinds of arbitrary regulations to ensure you get the result you wanted. If you’re offering something of real merit, however, there doesn’t seem much danger of losing profit. Indeed, the more people who know, the better.

To boil it down, people generally:

1) want to own things that they enjoy
2) are willing to pay for things they consider of value
3) tend to value “legitimacy”, to a point.

If you place before a person a dirty CD-R burn of an album and a full, legit copy, both for free, I think it’s fair to say that most people will choose the legit one. If instead you charge a reasonable price for the legit copy, a fair number may still buy it if they already know that they adore the music on the disc, they know they won’t find the CD for a better price, and they can afford it at the moment. If you charge an unreasonable price, or don’t allow people to test the album out first to see if they like it, the free, dirty copy will look all the more appealing by comparison.

All that things like Youtube and P2P networking and tape-trading do is bring a level of honesty and clarity to the exchange. So long as you offer something of merit, at a reasonable price, and your customers know that they like it, you’ve got nothing to fear. If anything, this kind of distribution serves as free advertising; all it should do is increase your potential customer base, to a certain threshold. (After all, every work has only a certain natural breadth of appeal.)

So yeah, whatever. Go ahead and watch what you will, how you will. Make up your own mind what you value, and to what extent. Then go ahead and purchase the things you like, provided you’ve the money after you buy what you need. There’s nothing dishonest or unethical about any of this. Anyone who tries to tell you differently has an agenda to protect.