The real challenge to creative economies are the billionaires sucking all the profit from album sales or deleting television shows from the face of the earth for a tax writeoff.

[–] blindsight 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Agreed. I copied that exact quote to see if someone called it out already. Also this one:

educational messages tend to try and educate the consumer on the moral and economic damage of piracy.

Citation fucking needed.

As an anecdotal example, I pay for Netflix, Spotify, Prime, and Kindle Unlimited (and CBC Gem partly through taxes), I regularly buy videogames and ebooks (and pay for a library with taxes), and I buy phone apps. I'm paying as much as I comfortably can for media in various forms.

I also pirate TV/film content, books, games, apps, operating systems, etc. A lot.

But about half the TV/film piracy is content I have already paid to get streaming access to simply because it's easier to pirate than figure out which service it's on, and the other half is mostly freely available on YouTube at garbage quality.

The content industry, net everything, is getting all the cash out of me that they ever will. Piracy has 0 net effect on my media spending; I'd just consume different content, content at a lower quality, spend more time on Where To Stream, and get books from the library a bit more often.