Convenient streaming services do not pay musicians a living wage for their work. It's basically still ripping them off.

The reality is high-qualit games like Mario Odyssey are very expensive to make.

If in some hypothetical future you can't turn a profit because everyone is pirating it, these games will either:

1. stop existing

2. be lower quality

3. follow the steps of free mobile games - full of ads, microtransactions, etc.

> Make something as easy as pirating and people will pay for it.

Would they still pay for it if all the content could be posted ( by 3rd parties ) on platforms like YouTube and viewed for free (besides the ad revenue which would be going to Google rather than to the author and/or companies that produced the content in the first place)? Of course that question doesn't make a lot of sense since most of that content wouldn't exist in the first place...

(I wasn't talk about piracy but rather responding to a comment advocating the total abolition of IP laws)

>people pirate mostly because it is easier and more convenient than the legitimate counterpart

Sure, same logic as "people steal when it's easy to do so"

>music piracy almost disappeared when convenient streaming services appeared

Too much to go into now, but Spotify is definately next on the list of enshittification. It's very easy to "end piracy" when your plan is to capture the market with unsustainable business models and clamp down later when money is tight.

>Make something as easy as pirating and people will pay for it.

We're kind of seeing that right now with Gamepass. And all that does is make me fear for the end of games preservation as we speak. But I suppose that's the market demand, so it is what it is.

We already saw what happened with the mobile scene with this. apps are essentially "free" so it's easier than piracy to jump in. I'm not sure if that's an ideal model either.