I draw comparisons to the vast value that was lost when Oink and What.cd were shut down.
That is one thing that makes me a bit sad about Spotify (and there's not much, I think it's a great product and I'd happily pay more for it if I could be sure a reasonable amount went to the artists I listen to) - I worry that people will get so used to streaming from large, but limited catalogs, that obscure recordings (e.g. 90s dance tracks only released on vinyl and the label is now gone) will be forgotten.
Hopefully there's enough hardcore fans to prevent that happening - but in an ideal world Spotify would somehow have access to all this kind of stuff you currently only find on YouTube!
If you all you want is a cold copy and not keep it online, the costs are not enormous perhaps 5K EUR or so.
When a few of them turned out to be from the same region, they would even organise "scanparties" where the goal would be to digitise whole sections of a particular library within a short time. I'm sure they raised some suspicion among librarians, and others would've noticed when entire shelves suddenly became empty, but to my knowledge no one was actually caught... and there were plenty of excuses to go around.
A memorable result from one of those is that there is now an extensive collection of car service manuals floating around on the Internet in various torrents and also as individual PDFs.
Through some unknown hero (to me) going out and scanning the service manual held at a technical school in a country town 4 hours from here I have a copy as a PDF.
You never know when what you're 'pirating' is providing a real and wonderful value to another person.
[1] surely the resources and money goes in different directions in official operations so not comparing 100%