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?
Do you think there will arise a time where no one would want to pay for the services they want thus watering down the quality of the content for everyone? I mean, I think of whatsapp, If I had to pay a dollar a month/year, I would happily do that, but yeah, that's not gonna happen anyday now.
That's one of the services where everyone refuses to pay, thus resulting in an inferior product (in terms of privacy). So, put this into the picture for piracy, do you think there will be a time where people will just refuse to see movies and this would result in shit movies being produced that no one likes.
The absolute tidal wave of shit media available belies that argument. Quality of material isn't going to be affected, that's produced by creative - who aren't being properly recompensed anyway.
Studios don't care about 'quality content' they care about money. In a world absolutely devoid of piracy they'd release a four hour film of a cat shitting in a box if they thought it would sell.
I think the profit motive isn't the best at producing good quality artistic content; and I think people would still produce it without such a motive.
Mind you on paper I wouldn't even be against paying for a good movie, for example. But I want a .mp4 in x265, with subs, that I can store on my NAS and read with whatever open source software I want to use. None of the legal platforms offer that - piracy literally offers a better service, universally
Same goes for video games: I want a native binary that I can install, that does not phone home at all, and does not have DRM or require a launcher. Only a minute minority of games, even on gog, match those
I think that has already happened to be honest