If they can sell their work without copyright, all good for them. It is not my fault if ideas can be indefinitely copied without anybody noticing. I am just saying that this is not worth monitoring.
Ideas should just not be treated the same as physical properties. They aren't. The market will adapt.
> But for traditionally premium media, Look no further than the music industry to see how this leads. Spotify is a race to the bottom and artist basically don't get any money from their actual music anymore. Great for consumers (it's all free with ads or paying a one time subscrption to remove ads), awful for those wanting to sing professionally.
Are consumers responsible for encouraging people to sing professionally? If they aren't being paid enough, maybe that they should choose a different career. Its a rough thing to say, but this wouldn't have happened to begin with if the music industry didn't become that big due to copyright.
> This decomposition of media to "just data" doesn't work at all in the favor of respecting art. are you really to blame for "just grabbing trees?", or "just grabbing reverbs in the air"?
Trees are physical. I don't believe that I should dig up your tree to put it in my garden. But I should have the right to take its picture and try to grow the same.
Bytes are bytes, you are the one imposing their values. Copying more files doesn't steal money from its author.
> Yes? If you value a product and you choose to not pay for it but consume it anyway,
These are only products because we have laws allowing them to be. It is mostly an artificial market. Without copyright these authors would probably do something else. Just because they decided that their work is worth money doesn't mean I should give them. Otherwise maybe that I should bill you for looking at my eyes if I decide so, would be unethical not to.
> You saw a piece of candy on the shelf and chose to pocket it. That would be considered unethical.
If I could duplicate that candy and leave with it, I would. Is it unethical? You are really trying to make the comparison between intellectual property and physical matter, but one can be duplicated and freely shared while the other cannot.
The problem is that you assume that author must be a job, while I do not believe that they should be particularly protected. There will be less of them and its not necessarily a bad thing. If you wanna get paid get funding beforehand.
> sure, life is all about compromises. I had plenty of rich friends take things for granted in grade school that my parent literally could not afford. I probably "lost" some rich friends because I could not engage in such actiities. Such is life.
Sometimes you indeed have to cope, not everything can be accessible. But in the case of digital data it is definitively possible, and people are independently distributing torrents, not like movie studios have to distribute their own work for free.
More digital piracy would also overall mean less production, and so less expectation from consumers, and less barriers for the people who cannot afford everything (or anything really). Going back to a more "organic rate" of story telling. Stories have always existed after all.
> And honestly, it's just the dishonesty that bothers me the most. Some just don't want to say they do bad things. At least own up to it. I pirate, sometimes I just don't care. I'm not a good person. There, easy.
Maybe that I am a bad person too then. But its a pretty quick reasoning, am I really to blame for downloading bytes over the internet? Why couldn't you blame all the creators for expecting this sort of income? am I to blame if their work only has value when imposed?
You are acting like entertainment exists in a vacuum. You go about your day, consume some movie, then go back to your life as if nothing happened.
In practice, new entertainment entices more people into consuming it. For example lets say your group of friend suddenly became huge fan of some unknown show, you didn't see it but they keep talking about it for days. You then notice that it costs $500. You indeed have the choice to not watch it, its not like you ever felt the need to before it has been mentioned to you, but won't you?
This example is a bit excessive but these kind of events happen all ever the case for entertainment that cost a fraction of it. The problem is that it stacks up.
As for your immoral accusation, its perfectly fine if you think this way, but I also believe that it is perfectly fine to think the opposite way. The only things companies can lose from piracy are potential sales, and ultimately if people aren't willing to pay for it I believe that it is fine for the company to shut down. Why should they be forced to pay for something they can access without causing any harm?
So if we encouraged people to make such terms to help with their end of month, looking at people would become immoral?
Pieces of paper/text shouldn't be able to dictate what is moral outside of common sense. The world I describe above would become a worse place for everybody.
Here, the problem is that the artist put a lot of time into making the song because there is the expectation of that term and the ability to extract money out of it. Without this expectation, none of it would feel immoral for either of both side.