Apparently 1 in 3 Australians are guilty of piracy! I try to avoid doing it, and don't pirate music or games at all, but I can't consider myself entirely innocent of this crime either.
Foreign movies (mostly anime, but I watch other stuff too!
) or manga are somewhat harder to obtain without resorting to the equivalent of pirating them, as they are only released here months after being aired/published in their country of origin. Sometimes they are released as an incomplete product (censored, or without the original language) or not at all. I would love to build up a collection of foreign DVDs, but cannot do so due to region locking. Lately, however, more and more online services are catching up in this regard, and offer things like subbed anime almost as soon as it comes out - although even though many of these are free services, they can also be region locked, frustratingly enough.
Region-locking links in with another reason that you don't touch on (perhaps because it's not an issue in the UK?) that does affect Australia. In spite of the fact that our dollar is currently equal to or even a little higher than the US dollar, we often have to put up with inexplicably higher prices for digitally distributed computer software, movies, games and music than most other locations in the world, which makes many people here feel that piracy is still justifiable.
For example, if you buy a digital copy of Microsoft Office 2010 Professional in the US, it will set you back US$349 (AU$349 and six tenths of a cent) - in Australia, that digital copy will cost you AU$849 (US$849.57). Microsoft is not the only culprit (Mac OS X Server 10.6 Snow Leopard = US$499 in the US, AU$699 here), just about every media company is guilty of this, and this is hardly a new issue. For a long time, AU$100 has been the standard price for a new game on just about every console (from as early as N64!) - the excuse is usually something about the Australian market being too small, and production/shipping costs being too high, but digital distribution is where their excuses have finally come across as being too weak. A few months ago our govt launched a price probe into this a few months ago, I'm not sure what, if anything, that will achieve, but it's better than nothing.
And just so that it doesn't seem like I'm completely excusing piracy, there is one complaint that I do have to make that isn't on your list - I really despise how lax kids are in regards to piracy (saying that makes me feel so oooooold!). Every year 7 that I teach has the latest Need For Speed on their computer, but how many do you think actually paid for it? Most of these kids are well off enough to own an iPhone, so it's not like they can't afford it, but they don't see a need to when they can just get it for free from their friends. Our school, and many other schools, become pirate havens, where kids use the school network to share movies, music and play games with each other without ever paying a cent. It would be nice if, when ensuring that every student in the nation was provided with a computer to enhance their education, the government actually took steps to try and prevent this obvious outcome. I look at lawsuits like
this and wonder if the kids at my school (or any schools in Australia) have any idea of what they are actually doing, and what the potential consequences are - no doubt their parents would blame the school for allowing them to share illegally downloaded content if they ever did get in trouble
