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Originally Posted by thesloppy
Just to play devil's advocate, you bring up an interesting point. If my moral responsibility is to the cast and crew making a living off that show, does my responsibility diminish as soon as that show is canceled/finished? As far as my extremely limited understanding goes, in the great majority of cases, the people getting paid in the case or re-runs, syndication, rentals, and purchases are the executives, producers, and studios.
What about buying used DVDs/TV series? Morally, there's seemingly an obvious difference between buying a pirated DVD on a corner in Chinatown, and buying a 'real' used DVD from some guy on ebay, but in reality the only difference is which particular individual gets my money. The used DVD peddler isn't paying for any more 'rights' than the guy in Chinatown, and neither prospective sale is going to trickle down to anyone involved in the production, at that point. If I download something, but I make sure to note to myself that I'm using my download to steal a prospective $1 sale from an individual at a pawn shop, rather than $19.95 from the source, have I lessened or raised my moral crime?
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Wed have to go a bit more down the theoretical path but not all that far. I do believe that the success of shows on DVD directly influences not only whether the creators of those shows will get a new show of their own but also whether or not similar shows will be made. For instance I think that if, for example, Pushing Daisies suddenly became a HUGE dvd seller then you would see a network try to make a similar show even though it was not very successful in its initial run.
The only concrete example I can really think of right now is a show like Firefly where DVD sales played a huge part in getting the Serenity movie made which likely helped a lot of its actors get other jobs like Nathan Fillion on Castle.
Again this is where things get far more theoretical and youd need to look at things over a longer amount of time to know. I can say that buying a dvd is certainly MORE helpful to the people you care about on the show than pirating one but i cant put a really concrete cause/effect relationship to it.
As for Used DVD sales....i doubt they matter much. Like you said, the person selling it to you is the only one getting the money. I dont think youll see TV and Films trying to limit used DVD sales like the games industry does though, i think they just take it as an acceptable loss built into their business plan.