The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you’ve already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations.

  • Zoolander@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    10 months ago

    What you just highlighted is still true, even if you disagree with it. The social contract of goods and services that underpins our entire economic system globally is that, in order to ingest a good (in this case, media), you’re agreeing to pay someone for the time that it took them to create that good in exchange for the value and enjoyment you get in ingesting it. If you never had an intention of paying and wouldn’t access it if you couldn’t find a pirated copy, then you’d move on and ingest something else, if that social contract was being upheld. The point being that, if you didn’t pay for it, you wouldn’t get to read/watch/listen to it. You can’t definitively say that no harm has been done because you can’t definitively say that you wouldn’t pay for it if that was an option. If piracy wasn’t an option but all your friends bought whatever and were constantly talking about it, you’d likely end up paying for it to be able to partake in those discussions. Game of Thrones, for example, was both the most-watched show on HBO and the most pirated show. If it wasn’t available to pirate, it’s dishonest to say that none of the people that did pirate it wouldn’t have paid for it and wouldn’t have watched it.