Do you pirate? And do you justify pirating? i.e., what is your piracy philosophy?
Well, my friend, he's kinda poor he can't afford some books and some streaming services, so he pirates. He pirate books, audiobook and videos and other stuff. Sometimes he buys books he likes a lot out of loyalty to the author (yeah, I don't understand it either), he likes to read physical books, but yeah, if he hates the author or just wants to skim through it, he will download the book.
He usually doesn't like to pirate from small companies or professors who are trying to make a living by selling books, but from millionaires & plenty of mega corps which already have loads of money, he feels like it's the right move to pirate
Also, have you ever noticed that you have felt that the value of a product has decreased just because you didn't pay for it, thus you are less interested to read it? i.e., had you paid for the book, you would have more likely read that book.
He says he will buy stuff when his time is more valuable than money, let's all hope that day is soon.
What are your piracy habits?
I can't find any logically consistent way too label piracy as immoral. It doesn't remove the original and it's just creating virtually free copies. It's the definition of a victimless crime.
The fact that you're hypothetically removing profit from the creator only becomes a moral issue if that loss of profit is A) guaranteed, that is, the recipient of the free copy would definitely have paid for it otherwise, and B) is significant enough to impact their life negatively. And the latter happening is much more an indictment of the system that demands people justify their existence through the extraction of profit than it is of the consumers who are just copying a few bytes.
The idea of paying more than a few cents for any digital media is frankly absurd. It's highway robbery that we're paying the same amount to rent a copy of a movie as to buy a pound of meat or a gallon of gas. It's 99% just blatant price gouging.
Some digital media costs a hundred million dollars to make. They make that money back by selling the product.
If nobody buys software, there will be no software companies to produce it.
Well call me a communist but I don't think that our society is benefited by spending a hundred million dollars on a single video game. Or a single movie for that matter. I would very gladly trade the massive AAA budgets for more restrained passion projects.