> Whether a business still makes money is not an argument as to whether torrenting their stuff would be OK.
But it should be in whether or not we spend lots of resources in helping them to increase their profits further.
> A physical business (e.g. clothes store) might make millions even though people steal stuff, but we wouldn't consider that as making stealing OK.
But at the same time we also don't attempt to prevent all theft, right? I mean, we absolutely could take tax money and have police officers strip you naked whenever you leave some store to make sure that thefts don't happen. We don't. Why not?
Playing devil's advocate, is a lot of tax money spent on protecting copyright? Aren't most infringers "caught" by private companies hired by the industry, who then send DMCA takedowns, letters to ISPs and file civil lawsuit?
Tax money is not the only way that society spends resources on enforcing rules.
Those DMCA takedowns, for example, need to be processed by hosting platforms and ISPs, so they have to pay people for doing so, and that's then necessarily part of the price that you pay for ISP service, or that, I dunno, youtube video makers get less revenue from their videos.
Just because the state doesn't spend tax money on it, doesn't mean it doesn't consume public resources.
And much more insidious are the opportunity costs, because they are more or less invisible: For example, the DMCA makes it a criminal offense to circumvent any technology that was intended to "protect copyright" or something to that effect. Now, there might be the opportunity for who knows what kind of technical innovation if that wasn't illegal. People could possibly build all kinds of nifty devices that allow you to use media in new ways or circumstances that would be perfectly legal as far as copyright is concerned--but people don't because that would be criminal. How much value for society is thus not created as a side effect of this ban? That value is also part of what we spend on enforcing copyright.
Or how about security holes in DRM software? As it's illegal to reverse-engineer DRM software, security researchers don't touch DRM software. But essentially all software that security researchers have ever looked at does have vulnerabilities. So, who knows how many people have been hacked via vulnerabilities in DRM software? How many people's data was stolen that way? Maybe people were the victim of identity theft due to vulnerabilities in DRM software? All of that also would be part of the resources that we spend on this.
Or what about when John Deere holds the data hostage that the tractors that they supposedly sold to farmers collects? And people aren't even allowed to swap out the tractor's software for their own due to DRM and the above criminalization of circumventing it?
You have to consider all the negative consequences that the existence of those rules has, because that all comes out of our collective wealth in order to prop up their business model.
But it should be in whether or not we spend lots of resources in helping them to increase their profits further.
> A physical business (e.g. clothes store) might make millions even though people steal stuff, but we wouldn't consider that as making stealing OK.
But at the same time we also don't attempt to prevent all theft, right? I mean, we absolutely could take tax money and have police officers strip you naked whenever you leave some store to make sure that thefts don't happen. We don't. Why not?