legit! i was wondering that too!
like... when i was little, my mom got tons of bootleg movies from china from one of her customers as a regular sort of gift. so i ended up watching tons of bootleg movies in all sorts of languages with english subtitles at the bottom taken by some dude in china who snuck a huge ass video tape recorder into a movie theater. loved it! i was especially fond of godzilla.
my mom also pirated a lot. before the internet, it was by recording songs on a cassette tape from the radio. then it was ripping cds. the cds (of course) had to be purchased first. the ripping just made the songs more convenient because you could mix and match songs from any album onto a mix cd to play in your car.
then when we got a good computer and internet (somewhere in the late 90's) my mom and i took to torrenting.
at the time, anime was known in the usa, but it wasn't very popular. and most animes were heavily edited, censored, mis-translated, or simply unavailable through legal means. torrents changed that! torrents broke down so many barriers and made the world so much more open and free. the community built around anime piracy was also very open, polite, and generally very helpful.
if not for the foundation that piracy provided, i dont think that anime would have had nearly the global presence that it has now. most sales of anime or anime related products (at least in the usa) owe their present day success to the pirates and fansubbers who helped push open those doors.
genuinely, i really dislike how quickly companies overlook the positive impact that digital piracy has on markets (and thats also ignoring the closely held personal belief of mine that art should be available to all without borders or censorship).
i wouldn't watch anime today if i didnt grow up pirating it first. and of those medias that i did pirate, i pirated because it was either unavailable in my country or because it was prohibitively expensive. i would not have purchased it legally either way, and therefore a sale was never lost. instead, if i enjoyed whatever it was that i pirated, i spread the word. i seeded the torrent. i basically became free advertisement.
and if i happened to find a piece of merch that i can afford for something i pirated and enjoyed, well... i usually end up buying it. thus, they did actually get a sale where they would have had none. thats not to mention the snowballing impact that seeding torrents and widening the potential markets would have had.
