No, but the second-order effects of you not paying may very well affect them in the future. If the studios get less revenue and have to pay more for enforcing IP law, they have less money for new productions and therefore less jobs and salary for the people producing the content. And I don't see why you should have a right to enjoy the fruits of their labor without paying.

That suppositions might carry some weight if Hollywood Accounting didn't deny every penny possible to those same people.

ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

The people we're talking about are paid in normal ways, and not via "percentage of the profits, which there will never be" etc

So this doesn't really impact them much after all.

Until we see publishers closing doors due to lack of profits this argument doesn't really work.

Something that affects profitability will change how many projects are worth doing, which will affect demand for their skills. Greater demand means greater ability to negotiate higher pay, and vice versa.

> but the second-order effects of you not paying may very well affect them in the future

I'm not a copyright abolitionist, but I'm curious what the second-order effects are to giving money to companies like Disney that are using that money to expand IP laws, buy up competitors, and impose one specific view of cinema on the entire market?

People should obey laws because generally it's a good idea in a functioning society to obey laws. But to the extent that people can deprive companies like Disney of revenue without breaking the law, I kind of feel like they should do so. Not just by avoiding their products, but by making it harder for them to make money in general. It would be good at this point for companies like Disney to fail and for the media ecosystem to become more diverse.

There are extremely negative effects that come from allowing one corporation to own so much culture. I'm not going to break the law, but I'm also not going to lose sleep over Disney the corporation losing profits, because I want Disney to lose money, and I want them to produce less content. I don't want Disney to be the biggest media producer on the market, they're crowding other people out and using their leverage to control things they shouldn't be able to control.

I will spend the money somewhere else and that is where they will be working in the future.

Without meaning to offend, that is not a good argument. If you rob a store and the employees have to quit their job, saying "I will spend the money somewhere else and that is where they will be working in the future" would not absolve you of the responsibility that you have indirectly damaged their livelihood.

The money/goods that I rob from a store cost a lot to reproduce, unlike movies. And I would scare people.

This is more like me buying from store A than from store B. Am I robbing store B?

Surely not giving to charity is worse than any other economic reallocation?

If store B is actually the black market then you actually did steal from the one producing whatever you bought or possibly from store A.

What do you mean by your first sentence? I am fairly sure that movies do actually cost quite a lot to produce.

On your second point I mean that there is zero marginal cost to produce a movie. To me, that makes that it cannot be compared to stealing e.g. a bag of M&M's.

I would bet that the marginal cost of that movie is actually higher than the cents it costs to produce that bag of M&M's. Even if the marginal cost of movies is 0 the cost of a bag of M&M is so low it might as well be 0. Does that now justify stealing the bag of M&M? No.

That does not even matter since looking at marginal cost of a movie makes no sense. Do you want to see movies? If yes then pay for them, if no then simply don't watch them. Justifying stealing isn't the way to go.

How fast would you be able to switch the industry you are working in?

I would guess that a lot of the jobs that are discussed in this thread are fairly specialised ones and if that industry would disappear they would be out of work.

The economic re-allocation doesn't have to be overnight or even in a single decade. It isn't as if the revenue suddenly goes to zero and the industry is nuked.

No matter how long it will take they will have to start fresh and whatever experience, knowledge and education they had becomes useless. Much more likely they simply become unemployed and stay that way.

That is an awful lot of time wasted of their lives.

It doesn't. Some people retire, some people leave the industry because they prefer something else, etc. All that needs to happen is that not all of them are being replaced.

On one single movie, no, but the expected revenue for a movie informs their negotiations (and the demand for their services). The reason high tens of millions of dollars are spend on VX for blockbusters is because they make a lot of revenue.

If what you’re saying so strictly true, yearly movie budgets would have been dropping year over year. With the obvious exception on the pandemic, is this what is happening?

Pay of individuals working on set, which the exception of huge name actors, is not really impacted by total movie revenue and they don’t often get dividends. Once the fixed cost is covered, which for most big movies it easily is, the rest is the gravy train for the investors.

"No yacht for me, no more movies for you."

"Those people are not making less if I don't pay for a movie. The marginal revenue is all yacht money profits"

The byzantine logic here on a supposedly 'smart site' really goes sideways on ideological issues were people have a) some ideology and b) they want it for free.

The failure of your comment is really quite evident: basically 'every purchaser' could make the same statement about 'marginal revenue' in which case, if nobody bought the content, then, there would be no content and no yachts.

And if everyone sold their stocks the economy would crumble and millions of people would be out in the streets and lose their retirement money, should we make selling stocks a crime?