The righteous person's guide to illegal downloading

One more half-baked idea for you folks. Downloading music/movies/stuff illegally is easy. The problem is, it's also illegal. But I think there's a good reason why even souls who have downloaded a few numbers without paying for them may still go to heaven. My point, which is a theory by itself, is that bandwidth is not free. So if lots of people are downloading stuff (whether legally or illegally), that should at some point drive up the cost of a fast internet connection. As a matter of fact, DSL/cable internet prices are pretty high right now. In effect, we needn't feel too guilty about illegal downloading (ID'ing), because we're all paying for it - we're just paying the wrong people! All we need is a transfer from the internet providers to the music companies.

Of course, not everyone is ID'ing, so people who don't ID are subsidizing people who do. So if you're someone who doesn't ID, you're paying for more (via higher internet connection prices) than what you're getting, so to redeem the situation you should probably start doing some ID'ing of your own. Not only is that rational for you, it may also create a positive externality for other ID'ers. Under the right conditions (strict upper hemicontinuity, etc) of all the relevant functions, at the margin, an increase in the number of people ID'ing may reduce the probability of any one person getting caught even though it increases the overall probability that someone gets caught.