Some other sucker is paying for your entertainment, so it's all cool?

I never said that. I just don't find the "if everyone did that" argument very compelling. For instance, if all 7.7 billion people lit wood fires every day, we'd have ash constantly falling down on us and the skies would be darkened, but we don't need to feel bad about setting the occasional campfire because the reality is that most people aren't going to be lighting fires all the time.

If too many people started burning wood and it began to pollute the environment, then a law would be passed banning it. And in fact, that's exactly what happened. There are burn bans happening all the time all over the world -- especially on the west coast.

https://forums.jlconline.com/forums/forum/jlc-online-peer-to...

The USA and other modern countries found that too many people not paying creators for their work caused problems and passed laws against doing it.

This is all working exactly how it is supposed to, so yeah, the "If everyone did that" is exactly compelling.

The opposite is true, you know. If people paid for more of what is good, pick up litter, and be nice to people, then the world would get better. If everyone reduced their carbon foot print, imagine how many more species would still exist today!

All you did was nitpick my argument and completely ignore the point I was making. Congratulations for fixating on details and not seeing the bigger picture.

> If people paid for more of what is good, pick up litter, and be nice to people, then the world would get better. If everyone reduced their carbon foot print, imagine how many more species would still exist today!

And yet they don't all do that. If everyone on earth just held hands and sang Kum Ba Ya, there could be world peace, but nobody's going to believe that's the way to end wars because not enough people are practically going to do that.

This is why "if everyone did that" can be used in a way that's fallacious, and it's insidious because it's true given that one accept the premise of universal participation. But even during the heyday of digital piracy, most people weren't pirating, or even pirating all of their consumed content. Hollywood and the like didn't ever come close to collapsing due to piracy.

All you need to do is to challenge piracy on a moral level. It's universally agreed upon that taking something without paying for it is a bad thing. Just because there is a minority of piracy advocates doesn't mean that those advocates don't recognize that they are doing something wrong. Saying "if everyone did that" just dilutes the impact of a single immoral act. Sure, I can imagine an off-the-wall situation were everyone pirated content. That image just isn't very realistic or useful in judging whether something is right or wrong. Fires might have been a bad example because, as you pointed out, we did ban burning in many places.