alt Hacker NewsI prefer the artists who make the work I enjoy not to starve. That is a moral/ethical principle.
Replies
There are some cases, such as the "I purchased this and then they removed the media I had purchased" cases being discussed in other parts of the thread, where the artist has already been compensated for the media they created. In those cases (specifically those cases), I feel like the people who then say "F it, I'm not buying it twice just to make Sony/Apply/Disney/whoever richer" and go download a pirated copy are ethically in the right: they compensated the creators in return for the right to watch the movie as many times as they wanted, and a third party (the middleman/distributor) then took that away from them. That the legal terms of the purchase said (in the fine print) "this is a license that can be revoked at any time" does not make what the distributor did ethical. What the distributor did was legal but not ethical.
Setting aside works whose rights are in dispute, have been sold or whose creators are long dead, can you elaborate on this in light of what we know about, for example, Hollywood accounting? If you want to put money in the hands of your favorite living artists, there are more efficient ways than buying their work through a middle man and hoping they live up to their end of the bargain. Buy merch directly through them, for example. More independent creative types tend to have things like PayPal for this as well...
Sounds like we need economic and/or social reform if people are starving.
That problem is largely irrelevant to copyright infringement. All copyright infringement (within a rounding error, exceptions obviously exist) doesn't actually hurt plucky artists from whom starvation is a real threat. Copyright infringement is largely a problem for corps who lose out on some money (money which almost certainly doesn't drip down to the actual artists).