News broke earlier this week that the Vice President of Content Acquisition for Netflix Kelly Merryman, in Amsterdam for the launch of the Netflix Netherlands, admitted to weighing piracy websites' traffic when making purchase decisions for its catalog. 

Such news comes as somewhat of an oddity for those who saw in Netflix a kind of low-cost, "lesser evil" that would help curb music and film piracy. After years of legislative delirium from lawmakers around the world (the French surpassing everyone, with their Gestapo-like HADOPI surveillance and punishment system), such a market-based solution soothes everybody's tooth by granting access to a vast collection at a small cost.

Though the online television giant does not question the fact that its fixed-price, all-you-can-watch model displaces so-called "pirates" and brings them "back into the fold" of "legitimate" content consumption, its recent statement regularizes (and legitimizes) piracy as part of the online content ecology. 

In a follow-up interview, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings even goes further, saying that "piracy creates the demand" for certain types of online content. What this means is that the access to content provided by sites such as BitTorrent and ThePirateBay are actually necessary for content industries to strive. 

Much beyond the argument that so-called pirates are much more likely to buy content of any kind – a point made in several studies circa 2010 – Merryman and Hastings actually normalize piracy by recognizing the fact that, in this day and age, downloads constitute the avant-garde of content consumption that provides valuable information for the regularization of such properties. 

They are, in other words, necessary for the functioning of our vast system of cultural production and distribution, which takes us one step further from the manichean worldview that relied on the demonization of fans and cultural consumers that many pseudo-artists have engaged in over the years – a point well made by Lawrence Lessig in 2008: 

"this war [against copyright infringement] is causing great harm to our society. Not only from losses in innovation.

Not only from the stifling of certain kinds of creativity. Not only because it unjustifiably limits

constitutionally guaranteed freedoms. But also, and most important, because

it is corrupting a whole generation of our kids"

Much beyond the interesting operational and statistical fact that Netflix turns to BitTorrent for data, such news are great for the banalization of something we've come to consider to be, in fact, quite banal for ourselves. 

When large content-driven corporations such as Netflix recognize the need for piracy, I think we can say, after all these years, mission accomplished.