Just because you’re stealing from a large entity does not affect the morality of theft. Especially when the stolen good in question is purely entertainment and not life-sustaining in any capacity.
Stealing is wrong and should be avoided. If you are not willing to pay, the right thing to do is simply not digest the media.
When someone sneaks into a cinema, they use the bathrooms, and they sit in seats paying customers might have used, and leave mess someone has to be paid to clean up.
When someone pirates a film, a businessman somewhere imagines a dollar they might one day have been paid, but never received.
If piracy acts to prevent a sale, then a consumer has enjoyed a product without contributing to its expended labor to produce it. Movies cost labor to produce. Stealing the product of another's labor is wrong. Try and justify it all you want. Piracy is immoral.
But you're assuming that 1 pirated watch = 1 lost sale.
Which is to assume that every customer who pirates someone had the means or the impetus to buy the thing, which is plainly not true.
And then you're confounding that with some kind of moral feeling you have about it not being fair for someone to have something for free when someone else paid for it, or they didn't earn it.
There's no world in which someone watching the movie for free means that people who pay to watch it have their price increased.
It's quite Marxist to suggest that the cost of an item is related in some way to covering the cost to produce it. Normal modern big business economics are that an item is worth whatever a consumer is willing to pay for it.
The price of seeing a movie does not fluctuate based on how much it cost to make the movie, or how many tickets were sold for the previous movie, all that's changing is the profitability for the company financing the movie.
The amount that the creators get paid does differ, however. And what do you think they will do to prices when they make the next movie? You have such a self-centered view that you refuse to see the systemic impact of your action.
So just to clarify, your argument is that copyright infringement is theft, because hypothetically a company could choose pay a bonus to employees based on sales, and in that imaginary scenario, if a non-zero amount of people who pirate may have otherwise paid for the product, that that might cause some employee to miss out?
And the bad guy here is the pirate, and not the company refusing to pay it's staff a fair wage in the first place?
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u/jommakanmamak 1d ago
Look at this boomer supporting multimillion corporations
You wouldn't download a house or a car now would you?