Legitimate and acceptable, certainly no.

You dismiss the "better experience" way too easily, though.

I know countless people around me who used to download illegally pretty much all the music they owned for many years, and I've seen them turn to i-tunes eventually (to the point I can honestly say I don't know many people in my personal or professional circles who pirate music anymore and who don't disapprove of those who do.. movies/TV though...), because it's very simple, because it's very safe (you can even choose to put an amount into your account, so you can even let your children use it without fear they'll load you credit card), because the prices are much better than what we used to pay in stores a few years ago taking into account both the devaluation of the product in consummers' eyes and what's saved from having physical media, distributors, retailers involved, because Apple has geolocated virtual stores that let you pay in your own currency and offer plenty of local products - all in your own language, because the music industry has already brought down several of its now outdated regional barriers and products from all over the world are thus available (no need to go seek pirated source for obscure foreign bands), because they've made their stores accessible as a mean of distribution for even artists without big labels, because searching for the product you want is even easier and faster than trying to locate a torrent (and often results in plenty of good suggestions of other stuff you might like), because it lets you put the music on several devices legally, because it lets you buy only the songs that interest you instead of forcing you to buy full albums every time and so on. In short, because it does provide a rather satisfying experience, enough so to have convinced tons of people already to return to the legitimate market for music. A lot of people who still download music peer-to-peer do so because they're looking for movies/tv shows at the same time.

The movie industry is holding everything back. The situation is far more complex for them, yes, but they're also moving too slowly and too conservatively, and are hindering the efforts of the music industry. Most of all, they've started looking into those issues way too late. For too many years, their vision has been to hinder and delay as much as possible the distribution of all digital content (files, not physical media). For too long, they've let the pirate sources be the only digital source of their products, and the few legitimate ones like Netflix, they've hindered rather than helped. I've seen this happen as an insider, so to speak (in a limited way). I work for service providers to the industry. For nearly 15 years now the service industry has been designing all kinds of models for internet broadcasting and distribution of content. I've got conferences were what we're seing now was foreseen: Hulu, Netflix, i-tune - all those models (we couldn't see how that could possible, bandwidth being what it was then, but that obstacle was the first to fall). It's the content producers (and largely the MPAA) that has been stalling things, answering "we're not interested, we don't want to go in that direction at all if we can avoid it, it would destroy all our traditional markets". It's only faced with the fact their fears this would increase piracy exploded in their face as pirate proved they didn't need them to provide files to make some available that they've started to change their mind or at least see this as inevitable eventually, but they haven't managed to bridge the gap at this point, and are still way too hesitant (part of the problem is that their industry relies so much on overpricing their products to finance overproduction and so on). No one's saying that will be in any way easy for Hollywood to adapt its business model, but a lot of people are saying they've started way to late to envision it, and are still way too conservative in the ways they even look at how they could innovate and recuperate some of their market lost to piracy. Most innovations in the field right now come from outside the US, from smaller producers of content. BBC (for instance) is offering a player (for computers and portable devices like i-pad alike) that for just 8,99$/month (and this service is available to anyone in the world) gives you not only unlimited access (stream-only) to much of their current programming, but also offers a huge amount of their archives. The technology exists of course to push that content to your HD TV, making it a very interesting alternative not only to getting BBC America on cable, but even to buying their DVDs of older series. A Canadian broadcaster (public) offers the same (for over two years now), for the time being for free (it's financed by ads), and for all the material it could, it's abolished the regional restrictions. It's even offered the platform to foreign content producers (at the moment, they have several series from France, from other Canadian broadcasters, from the UK, from Spain) as well as having many original "web only" TV series, some of them massively popular, in rather unusual formats (5 min, 10 min, 14 min episodes and so on). It's not even just a few recent episodes, it's most often whole seasons they offer, sometimes several - even though the DVD is also available. What are the US cable channels waiting for to join the trend and reach (paying) viewers worlwide even in markets they currently can't sell the rights to broadcasters, God only knows. You'd think the more in demand content producers like HBO would have seen seized the opportunity by now, especially when so many cable providers worlwide offer channels like HBO only as part of pricey packages of several channels, not on its own. Paying a monthly fee similar to what they charge for their subscription on cable directly to HBO to get their content via streaming only, anytime! Get access to their back catalogue so I don't have to pile up their boxsets or go to the rental store, even better. But as long as they'll keep trying to charge 4,99$ to download on i-tune a single episode of a series (and not even as it plays on air, but merely later as an alternative to buying the physical media, and not a much cheaper one), when that means for the price of the whole series I can subscribe and watch their whole programming on cable for the duration of a season of that series, and record whatever I want to watch it again and again, that's very much like trying to attract flies with vinegar... The US content producers really seem to be looking at this as if it was a fringe phenomenon that if they wish hard enough, and hinder the popularity of hard enough, they might make go away. And yet for over 15 years they've been told internet distribution would become their primary mean of distribution and broadcasting sooner than later, but they keep saying "over my dead body". Well, it's already started, and they're not ready for it, and in the meantime one of their most fervent argument to delay going in that direction when they should have has happened anyway: piracy of their products has become endemic and hurt them, and rather than having taken
the lead and bringing their customers to the new platforms, possibilites and new ways to consume their products, they're way behind and now have to recuperate customers lost to piracy.