People pirate because it's available. The advice of "don't buy it" (by which you really mean don't play it) is therefore pointless moralizing; it's not going to sway people who are looking for something available to play.

If you just think abstractly about the problem as a bunch of kids who are bored and looking to play, and they come upon a ball which is not being used by anyone, that is a better mental model. Why are they playing with this ball that is not theirs? Because belonging is an abstract social relation which has far less cognitive importance to the kids than the immediacy of play, so who cares who the ball belongs to. Will having someone standing atop the ball forcing them to pay a fee to use it cause them to fairly pay for the ball? Probably not, because that's not the model that they're working under. Certainly it gets worse if they try to force every single kid to pay independently for a ball that they can share. "But surely someone made that ball, and made it available, and should be compensated for this!" Well, kind of. I think from the pirate's perspective that's already been taken care of, so to speak: the developers were paid for their creative works, while the pirate community has paid for the networking which made the content available, so if you're asking her to pay for anything, she is paying perhaps some investor, or perhaps she is paying for a future game title to be produced.

(Notice that none of this really "defends" any "side". In order to understand what's going on and try to work on a solution, I'm basically checking that sort of judgmentalism at the door.)

I don't pay for anything unless I can try it or read a ton of reviews about it first. I've still gotten burned a few times but never felt any moral outrage over it. It's not some inalienable right to download stuff for free.

Your willingness to pay before you play says more about your income than anything; if nothing else, you probably have reliable income and can afford to make riskier bets.

In your own words, you say copying is human nature. It sounds like the "pay-before-evaluate" model is hoping to change that. I'd say expecting human nature to change is unrealistic. Isn't it easier to just exploit human nature? I mean, isn't that good capitalism?

(Everyone's rationalizations are self-serving, including your own, otherwise thinking would be a liability...)

[1] - No, this is not a defense of Disney at al and ever-growing copyright lengths, but neither is it an allowance that running roughshod over the little guy is acceptable either.

no sense.

none.

Do not try to shoehorn a model where it doesn't fit, and for data: It doesn't fit. A different standard has to be adopted, and piracy is merely a symptom of that.

Copyright exists because we, as a society, want it to. We want people to make things for us to consume and so we enact laws to make it so they can do so and still eat. Don't like it? Feel free to try to change the law.

But that's hard, and hard things aren't fun, so let's just go pirate Game of Thrones, yeah?

I think it's not clear that "society" "wants" copyright to exist. Society, or at least the collection of individuals composing society, is pretty clearly conflicted on the subject. People want to retain creative control over their own work, to a degree that is clearly insane and impossible. And simultaneously people (some of the same people!) want to be allowed to do whatever they feel like with the works of others, to a degree that is... dubious. The sum of these positions is not clear.

And in any case, the legal status quo does not derive from any such sum. It derives largely from Disney's lobbying, as you acknowledged.

And in fact, what society does about statuses quo is not "take the bad with the good", and "try to change the law". Historically, that's not how the law gets updated. I'm not personally drawing an equivalence between copyvio and e.g. slavery or e.g. marijuana policy or e.g. religious intolerance... but hopefully those examples will demonstrate that in most cases the law follows popular sentiment and disobedience, not leads.

Copyright exists because a majority of society currently thinks its the best way to produce, and that very well may be in the real world of limited supplies. In a world where the only value is novelty, copyright makes no sense. Once something is created, it's value drops because it's supply is infinite. Currently society thinks the way around that is to artificially restrict supply.

I hope one day we will realize that were trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

I would LOVE to pay for game of thrones... to be produced. Buying a copy of game of thrones is not worth its value, it has no value. It is in infinite supply. It is like air.

This is why we donate to blogs, subscribe to series, and fund kickstarters. Because that is the economy of the web. The true economy.

I assume that piracy of games behaves similarly to piracy of music and films, both of which have had research published suggesting that while piracy harms large, blockbuster style releases it actually helps sales of smaller, more obscure titles.

I've got quite a few games still in their shrink wrap on my shelf because I've never had to open them to get at their ROM/CD.