> Of course, as a content creator myself, I do believe that there should be some sort of reward and protection for creating content.
This is often the framing of the debate around piracy, but I think it's fundamentally incorrect. Numerous studies over the years have shown that pirates spend more money on media, not less. Media companies want to frame this as a debate about money because it seems logical that we should reward content creators, but it's fundamentally not a debate about money because if it were, content creators would have no reason to be unhappy about piracy.
In reality, the real issue is control. Media companies want to control how and when you consume media, and pirates want to control how and when they consume media. This war isn't just being fought in the piracy space either--it's part of the motivation behind the move to subscription streaming services and streaming protocol changes that no longer serve up video files.
Personally, that's exactly why I spend more money on media than my friends: I have an extensive CD collection (and a somewhat less-extensive BluRay collection) and if you do the math on that it's very clear that it would be cheaper for me to pay for literally every music streaming service than what I spend on CDs each month. I'm not going to give exact numbers, but the amount of money isn't even in the same ballpark. But my CDs don't disappear, I can rip them and play them on any of my devices, I can leaf through my CDs and rediscover something I had forgotten instead of having some algorithm push me toward the latest dictated hotness, etc.
And to be clear, I'm saying "media companies" here, not "content creators", because almost universally the content creators aren't the ones trying to exert control over the content they create. On the contrary, my #1 tip for pirating academic papers is to email the author and ask them for the paper--I've literally never received a "no" to literally hundreds of such emails I've sent. Music and movies are different because they're usually less of a one-person product and more of the money actually makes it to the content creators, but generally musicians I've talked to are not the ones restricting their media to one streaming platform or refusing to allow MP3 downloads, or refusing to release on physical media--that only ever happens when big media companies get involved.