In regards to porn via bittorrent and newsgroups:
The last time I joined a site, I discovered the content because someone posted it to a newsgroup. If I hadn't been able to download the site for free, I'd never have joined it.
Should I be prosecuted?
Oh, people join sites all the time because of free content. Free content is the big hook to get you into sites to join them
. Sometimes site owners release the content into the wild like that, but you would never know if that was the case or not.
For me, it's not about whether you should be prosecuted for downloading anything, but rather that the artist/pornographer/scientist/writer decides what is best for his property. In that way, rather than some fundamentalist asshole deciding that certain kinds of work are "less valuable to society" than other types of work, the decisions about the value and ownership belong to the property owner. I really do not want other people or the government forcing me to labor for free. Eh.. whether or not you accept IP, there is the component of labor involved in creating it. Don't libertarians think that labor is a contract agreed upon by two or more parties? If there is a disagreement, there won't be any labor. I set the price for my labor, and the terms. If people do not want to enter into contract with me, then they do not get the fruits of my labor, my creations.
It's unnessesary to have any laws telling us "how long" or "what the terms are" for IP. If we simply left the decisions up to the property owner and the free market (and the free market tends to favor that which is "free" ) there would be a lot more in the public domain than there is now.
In the case of porn, there's so much more to it that just "IP." You have all kind of ridiculous regulations devised by the fundamentalists, and if you are doing any extreme explicit content, you better have an OJ dream team. Licenses, software, and the fraud against adult business is outrageous. Just try to get your own merchant account if you are running an adult site, it's nearly impossible. Why? Because of the huge amount of fraud perpetrated against adult sites in the form of chargebacks. Joe Horndog decides that he wants to whack it, joins your site and then after he's had his satisfaction, simply charges back the bill once he receives it. Happens ALL the time and aside from collection efforts, which are sometimes effective, but usually he gets away with his fraud without any responsibility whatsoever.
This is the reality of adult biz. Maybe if people were made to answer for the real crimes like fraud and force rather than whether or not they have a typo on thier 2257 paperwork (which can land you in jail for 10 years) you'd have a lot more pornographers willing to release a lot more stuff for free.