While pirating music or movies, one may try justify ones actions, but deep down it feels wrong.
This doesn't even feel wrong. These parasites had it coming.
This doesn't even feel wrong. These parasites had it coming.
It still feels wrong when popular artists do not get paid for their work because it's more convenient for people to pirate it.
I mean, creative/artistic efforts take a lot of time, regardless of how easy reproducible the results are. By paying for their previous songs, you're basically funding their next songs, something you should be interested in as a fan.
Popular artists barely get paid for the sale of their music. They earn the bulk of their money from touring and merchandise sales (see: finite things).
Given that, piracy is actually far more detrimental to the publisher/label than it is to the artist because it could mean an additional fan to purchase another ticket at a show or buy another t-shirt at a merch table.
In fact, by charging money for the music, it actively discourages people from listening to it because they can't afford it or already spent their budget on artists they already know and like. In an industry where gaining fans is the most important thing you can do, this seems counterproductive.
Personally I stopped chasing music or movies. Mostly because nothing of that era appeals to me anymore :D (I also abused it younger and don't feel the need to binge watch as before and also prefer to pick a few stuff to give money to to support creators putting nice work).
That said, I do grab some old alternative stuff from time to time. Quite often they're not buyable anyway. Release the krakens hollywood.
We should strive for a logical explanation that transcends emotional response.
1 + 1 = 2, regardless of how I feel about the numbers or operators.
Honestly, if you are implying that math is a philosophy that is just as fallible as human emotion I am very interested, although very, very skeptical.
PS - Please do not ruin math. It serves as my only foundation with reality.
The fact that the distribution cost is close to zero is irrelevant.
The problem with copyright is that a big proportion of the price charged is basically cartel/gatekeeper protection money, and has no useful relationship to the true social cost/value of creative work.
Before I wrote book X, there were no copies of book X in the world. The supply was zero, not infinite.
After I wrote book X, the supply was one. Then it grows as people make copies. Copyright law can limit the growth, certainly. (Or enhancement, as the potential profits help promote distribution.)
But copyright law is meant to encourage the growth from 0 to 1 by making it possible to make money from the growth from 1 to N, before the lack of copyright protection makes it effectively infinite.
It's true that plenty of people will write even without getting paid. It's also true that plenty of people wrote because they will get paid. Heinlein started writing to pay off his mortgage.
Copyright law is also the basis for free software. If you take away copyright law, you end up supporting proprietary software distributed only as compiled machine code, not reusable source. This to "impoverishes" the human race.