But why is it your problem? Suppose I just wrote a sonnet sitting here in my spare time. I don't want others to know it though so I'll only share it under extremely-controlled circumstances for a lot of money to maintain this artificial scarcity. Why is it your moral imperative for you to crush my carefully-maintained monopoly on my stupid little sonnet?
I currently feel there's a spectrum of cultural importance on media. On the one end, you have your sonnet, that few people even know exists. On the other end, you have Game of Thrones.
At some point a piece of media becomes so widespread that it becomes a part of shared culture. It could meaningfully affect everyone[0], like Harry Potter or even Game of Thrones (I'd expect everyone to be at least aware of its existence). Or a subculture, like Star Trek or Star Wars for people with even passing interest in science fiction (or STEM), or StarCraft for people into PC video games. These works weave themselves into the fabric of society - people lift phrases from them, make metaphors referencing them. Hogwarts is the modern Troy. Being unable to access these works - especially at the same time everyone else around you is perusing them and talking about them - becomes cultural isolation.
With books, we have it solved, thanks to libraries. Almost anyone can get legal access to almost any written work - where they don't have the money, they can substitute it with effort, to get to a library (and possibly convince the library to buy the work, or fetch it through inter-library loan, etc.).
With music and movies, we had it solved in the past too. You could be exposed to popular works through radio and TV, both private and public. This worked better pre-Internet, because while media distribution was regional, the culture was also regional. Not so today - with the spread of the Internet, the culture became international almost overnight. With Internet, enough of us in Poland can enjoy Game of Thrones simultaneously with the rest of the world that it becomes expected of everyone to enjoy it in lockstep with the whole planet.
Videogames gained mainstream popularity around the same time Internet did, so there was never an equivalent of a library, or public broadcasting, for games. You either buy one or pirate it. If a game suddenly gains worldwide popularity[1] and every one of your friends is playing it, you'll either buy it or pirate it, just so you can feel included in their conversation.
And that's ultimately the main justifying factor I'm currently exploring: entertainment media are social objects. One of their most important roles is to glue communities together, by giving people shared experiences to talk about. Once a work becomes popular enough, I can't really blame people who pirate it because they too want to be a part of the conversation.
The sonnet from your example? It isn't popular at all, it isn't part of culture, so I'd consider pirating it as an act of malice. My view would change if I suddenly started seeing it mentioned on the news.
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[0] - Not everyone everyone, as there are plenty of people with little to no access to Western media. It's much less than 50% of the planet, but much more than "the West", so I don't feel writing the latter would be right either - so where I say "everyone" in this thread, it is to mean "everyone within the broadly understood sphere of influence of the Western culture".
[1] - Which doesn't happen by accident; a lot of money and effort goes into marketing, in order to make this happen. And piracy was historically a part of it, too: few people actually bought originals of Diablo or StarCraft or Red Alert in Central and Eastern Europe, and yet they were hugely influential there, all thanks to folks with CD burners in their trucks.
Your argument about their scarcity being artificial also seems pretty flawed to me. Naturally occurring diamonds are genuinely scarce, and most people value them differently from lab created ones (as they are free to do). Perhaps those people are just being stupid, but they’re no more stupid than all the other people in the world who find value in useless things. It’s not illegal to make lab made diamonds, they’re freely available on the market. But just like a pixel-perfect print of the Mona Lisa, they’re not valued quite as much as the real thing.
I presume you’re talking about De Beers (as this is such an often repeated meme)? Their market share is ~23%.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/585450/market-share-of-d...
They’re also quite tightly regulated by the EU, and since 2006 have been prohibited from buying stock from Alrosa (the actual largest diamond supplier in the world). So their scarcity is most certainly not artificially maintained by De Beers, as people so often like to claim.
See e.g. https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-de-beers-2011-12?...
You’re also quite narrowly focusing on the romance angle (which is the result of successful marketing, not artificially induced scarcity). I don’t think Quavo wears an iced-out AP as a symbol of love, for instance.
The artificial scarcity argument simply defies logic. The entire worlds supply of natural diamonds was created hundreds of millions of years ago, and the earth is done making them.
- What is valuable as a symbol of love is something completely useless, but which requires you to burn excessive amounts of resources (money). This is because the act of figuratively setting your money on fire clearly signals that you're making a sacrifice (and the amount of money you thus burn also doubles as a proxy for your wealth).
- The scam was established by what's now over a century of ongoing marketing efforts to convince generations of people to consider diamonds as a symbol of love, thus to be priced per rules described above.
- The scam is maintained by finding ways to create artificial scarcity. For instance, lab-made diamonds are very cheap and made to much higher quality than naturally-found ones, but "naturally found" is a perfect discriminator to force scarcity around. Hence it's the mined ones that are used for jewelry.
Textbooks, or videogames, are products of utility, and don't have the aforementioned dynamics. The only thing that's happening is point 3: publishers trying to find a way to make artificial scarcity work, without a benefit of having a good discriminator (all bits are created equal) - hence DRM.
Of course none of that justifies robbery, but in all cases it does justify every effort to prevent artificial scarcity from being established and maintained.