jayeff

What you wrote seems all very logical and positive. The fundamental flaw is that the appeal of torrent sites isn't that they provide free content: plenty of sites do that. Their appeal is that they provide free access to content which isn't supposed to be free. Any torrent site which allowed itself to get loaded up with content that people want to give away, would lose its audience.

There will always be things like this, which allow a few people an edge but do not scale up. That they can at most only benefit a small minority - to the detriment of most - is why, rightly, they must be seen as "the enemy".

Zango is the same: it would collapse if we all began promoting Zango installs instead of sponsors. If every single one of us hired effective black-hat SEO outfits, we would be back with the same level playing field as we had before the first one came along. In every such case, the only lasting impact is to cut someone else in on our profits who does not in any way help increase those profits.

That's the price of playing along with short-term greed and that is why a legitimate industry must distance itself from all such things and the people associated with them. That doesn't change just because it isn't immediately obvious how to shut them down.