It seems pretty natural to me. People generally have less problem with stealing a candy bar than stealing a car. (Consider the cost to produce a NYT article vs the cost to produce a Hollywood movie). I don't think the stealing-vs-pirating analogy is perfect, but it's related.

It is actually pirating content by companies for humongous profit, or pirating by individual human beings for free access to culture and entertainment, oftentimes for content one has already paid for, but rendered inaccessible by megacorporations.

Which content making businesses earn humorous profit margins?

Are all the journalist layoffs a fever dream?

This is one of the more profitable ones, and only because they employ unscrupulous tactics:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NWS/news/profit-ma...

This is NYT, the most successful news business:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NYT/new-york-times...

As for movies/tv show/music makers, let’s just say most people in the software engineering business would look at their numbers and count their lucky stars that they are not in the movie/tv show/music business.

(It is also true that excessive copyright lengths have removed access to content that the public should have a right to).

> Which content making businesses earn humorous profit margins?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_(magazine)

https://www.theonion.com/

> Which content making businesses earn humorous profit margins?

You got my point backwards: AI companies will make it from the pirated content, that individual users don't make.

The movie/tv show and music business can keel over and die tomorrow - it wouldn’t affect the value of art produced by humans at all. I see those more as exploitative leeches than as contributing anything positive.

If only piracy would actually harm these businesses but alas as often demonstrated it has zero effect on their bottom line, if anything it increases their profits.

What do you mean by "art"?

Hard question, but in the context of my comment I would say any kind of visual media or music

Of course pirating any media is totally fine from a moral standpoint.

There's no way to get your money back if you didn't like the content. If they don't want their articles to be read for free then they should keep them out of my view. And certainly not use clickbaity headlines. Information can be copied and they should accept it, or change their business/distribution model.

So if I went to a cinema and didn't like the movie, I should be entitled for a return, right? Or if I went into a museum and didn't like the art displayed there?

If you are advocating for a free for all libertarian dystopia, well, I have some bad news for you - they never work.

> So if I went to a cinema and didn't like the movie, I should be entitled for a return, right?

Not being able to un-see a movie and get your time and money back is one side of the coin. The other side is that information can be copied.

Both sides suck for one of the parties. There's no reason why one of them gets it their way, especially if it requires a contrived legal framework while the other way would require nothing at all.

You’re not paying to enjoy the content, you’re paying to experience the content.

And as long as you had the opportunity to experience the content, you’ve gotten what you paid for.

I don’t see “I don’t like it” as a valid reason for a refund.

> You’re not paying to enjoy the content, you’re paying to experience the content.

Not sure about others, but I'm not.

Your personal opinion on the matter has little weight here.

It doesn't matter what you think you're paying for or should be paying for, the fact of the matter is that you're paying for the effort people put in bringing that to you. So you are, whether you want to be or not.

Would you make the same argument for a sporting, theatrical or music event? That you should be refunded if you didn't enjoy it?

Does it matter? Sounds to me like an apples and oranges comparison.

If I read an article in the NYT then I'm paying for what I took away from it, not for the amount of time that it allowed me to kill.

I don't agree with the OP but how are refunds a free for all libertarian dystopia?

"Information can be copied and they should accept it" <- I was referring to this line. This basically means that OP thinks that any intellectual property should be free for everyone. This means that probably half of humanity (who are currently creating anything with IP) will have to be libertarians, and that can't happen unless all humanity are libertarians. And libertarian society is a dystopia. :)

> This basically means that OP thinks that any intellectual property should be free for everyone.

Incorrect. Many intellectual property has a certain merit that can be demonstrated before it is consumed. E.g. "This piece of software allows you to create 3d models". On the other hand, an article with headline "Will new batteries allow 10x more energy storage?" does not tell me anything.

I wonder what the reaction of some of the people who browse this forum would be if the output of their careers were so commonly pirated. Somehow, I think most think that this argument doesn't apply.

I’d be pretty delighted. I’m paid for getting projects done, not for keeping hold on some copyrighted code. I want all my code to be open sourced, and reused.