[Kyocera Zio M6000] phazei:
The corporations may suffer, but I think the stigma falls on the executives for any of the peons losing their jobs. The executives have a choice, lower their bloat and take a reasonable salary and decide it'll be ok to have slightly lower profits, or screw their own people. They decide to maintain profits rather than help people, and they are the ones with the power to fix that. The corporations 'bottom line' is costing people their jobs, not piracy.

The income gap is simply a reflection of top the heavy corporations. Corporations making the decision to distribute their profits evenly, by increasing peon's salaries and lowering their own, will solve the problem. (I'm not saying there shouldn't be a slope to the salary curve between peons and execs, it just shouldn't be an Everest.) But no one ever told them "with great income, comes great responsibility", just "with great income, comes even greater income"

What's pirated might be non-essentials, but by pirating, those people allow themselves the essentials, by offsetting the cost of entertainment. A family of 3 going to the movies is $40-$60. Anyone who needs to weigh that against their funds for groceries is in need of some entertainment. People pursue their happiness how they can when in need. And even if they aren't in that much need, they are selfish just so much as the execs. So in that sense, people themselves are the problem, on all levels, so they need some form of regulation. But that regulation should favor the greater majority, not the corporations and execs. Unfortunately the majority don't even realize who they are and don't organize well, while small, rich, minorities take well advantage of that fact.

I never thought of piracy as posh and edgy, it certainly wasn't when people were downloading windows 3.1 took 10 hours for half a dozen or so floppies. For the majority of people who pirate, I think it's a (mostly) thoughtless act; they don't take into account its effects. Of course there are driving factors, but they aren't directly aware of them. It's like most young adults now-a-days, if you ask them why they like something, they often will reply they 'just do', and won't get more in depth unless they are prodded.

OTOH, when execs decide they want to take as much money as is possible, it is anything but a thoughtless act. They go to great extents to make that happen, and that affects more people then piracy ever could (ENRON). In that sense capitalism is entirely successful, but the trip there (its growth before towering corporations), toward its ends, is much better than the ends themselves for the majority. And what's even worse is the corporations try play the victim*, greatly exaggerating claims (yeah that's extrapolated). In the mean time, while unemployment has been going up, so have the profits of corporations. They distort the difference between being in the red and being less in the green, between losing money and making less money.

There's a big difference between theft in a store and online piracy. There are no manufacturing or distribution costs when downloading something. If an item is stolen from the store, there is a much greater effect, and it's not universally distributed. I don't believe they can or should be related. No store has closed because of piracy. Blockbuster didn't close because of piracy, they closed because of services like Netflix and Redbox, they never adapted.

One could argue "if people didn't pirate, the corporations would be able to pay their peons more" or "if corporations paid their peons more, they could afford to not pirate". The former made more sense before the digital age, there was a direct correlation for loss, that the corporations are still playing on with downloads, even though that correlation isn't nearly as strong. In addition, the corporations have been becoming increasingly more top heavy, since costs are much lower but they found they can still charge the same prices. So there is more money, and they simply hold onto it. Before piracy became 'posh and edgy', the corporations weren't distributing that extra income, so even if they can, they won't pay their peons any more than they have to and will just drop them like lemmings to keep increasing profits. As for the second argument, people have always pirated, but it has never been as prevalent as it is now. I don't think there's any getting rid of it. And making it illegal isn't any more effective than weed being illegal. It can be minimized, but the way to do it isn't to find people and make examples of them ala the RIAA, but to make the people not need to.

Piracy might not be a victimless crime, but it doesn't have such great effects as the corporations claim. It doesn't directly affect the individual peons that make up the corporations. It slightly affects the profit margins and it is the execs decision to redirect that back to the masses. They exaggerate the effects so they can play the victim.

*When I say 'play the victim', I'm not saying they aren't a victim, but that they aren't a faultless victim.