This applies to all piracy, but I'll just post it here since a thread on lemmy.ml's anime board made me think about it. Just some quick thoughts on a truism that people just repeat over and over until it's just assumed to be true. The initial sentiment that piracy is always a problem of access to commodities as opposed to other factors was initially made/said by Gabe Newell, who is literally the owner of a digital games service which makes its money almost solely from making other people's games as available as possible across the globe. He's also a capitalist whose shown no real positive conception of economics for the greater good, so it'd be nice if fellow leftists had some skepticism on what his motivations for this ideology might be.

I'm pro-piracy, so I'm not here saying not to pirate. What I think though is that this is mainly used as an easy deflection from what the real problem of the digital consumer economy is. Because capital seeks to constrict and control the market stuff like borders, copyright law/DRM, etc. which are enforced by the state will always exist under capitalism. Atomized capital finds it beneficial for each individual capitalist to try to squeeze as much money out of purchasers via upselling, DRM, region locking, copyright litigation, etc. rather than to pool their resources together internationally or whatever. And if the market is ever dominated internationally like that either via monopoly or cooperatively by the capitalists (a cartel, essentially) they still have the same motive to try to control consumers to make profits more dependable and attempt to extract more from them because of investors and the profit motive.

This means that the "service problem" will literally always exist as long as capitalism exists and capital will be forced to compete against piracy so long as they can't stop it. Which is good in the sense that consumers have a outlet to still get what they want without having to pay these companies if they don't want/need to (essentially re-cooping some of their lost surplus value form capitalists on a societal scale). But the problem of how do we get money to the people who make art is still there, even if capitalist control of digital art/software crumbles, piracy advocates just don't realize it yet. The capitalist mode of production doesn't mesh well with near-infinite reproduction, so they try to stifle it via the aforementioned ways. The means by which piracy even occurs is by computers and the internet which are both heavily subsidized by worker's tax dollars and the government, so people are already contributing to making art cheaper to distribute for these people. We should be encouraging people to look at the mode of production itself rather than the symptoms of it (again it's DRM, region locking, etc.) and socializing the production and funding of art.

"It's a service problem" also focuses almost entirely on consumption rather than production, which is a pattern you'll see with westerners/western leftists, so the question of #1 how to fund and facilitate production doesn't come up and #2 'where do workers get their buying power from and how much of it do they have' also never comes up. This entire thing doesn't even question where workers get the money to pay for these goods from, it's totally divorced from macro-economics. They just assume that if they made the market frictionless enough that prosperity would happen, which we should obviously know is false. Workers are already maxing out their means of consumption on necessities and luxuries, they're already deep in debt, there's no more profitability to be squeezed from them and the workers of the art too are also squeezed of most of their surplus value.

The growing issue of piracy will become more and more as profitability continues to plummet, but making it more convenient won't make it (much) more affordable or increase profits. Making it more convenient will also never happen in the peripheries outside of the imperial core as they will never have the collective buying power or infrastructure to make it worthwhile for companies to invest in making their products available there. There are some profits lost due to inconvenience, but saying the only problem with production and economy is convenience is liberal and idealistic, it attempts to reify the supremacy of the market.