Gabe Newell of Valve Software has famously said that piracy is a distribution problem, and I fully believe he's right.

> “The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work,” Newell said. “It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”

Steam single-handedly killed even the temptation to pirate games for me, because it's ridiculously convenient to just fire up Steam, click a button, and have the game delivered to my desktop at multi-megabit speeds without any obnoxious DRM getting in the way of me being able to play. Pandora, Spotify, and most recently Google All Access make music piracy a complete non-issue for me, because I don't want to have to spend time chasing down a song or even futzing with iTunes - I just punch something into search and it's playing. Netflix and Hulu provide so much content that I can't watch all of it - while they don't always have the most recent content, they have a lot of it.

Provide me a service that is a. affordable (Steam Sales and $8/month for movies or music are excellent models here, content folks) b. convenient (click button, enjoy content), and c. reliable (no explanation necessary) and I won't have any incentive to pirate content.

I'm convinced that the people who can afford stuff but pirate it anyway do so because of distribution problems in getting that content legally. The people who pirate stuff who can't afford it, or wouldn't buy it if they can are arguably even a net benefit - they aren't lost sales, but they increase the reach and visibility of the product. In either case, it's not really worth worrying about them (though the studios sure do love to gripe about them as if they're all lost sales), which leaves us with one very easy solution - have the best distribution channel available, and people will pay for it. At that point, piracy is about as solved as it'll get from an economic standpoint.

> Some people also think using animal products isn't ethical and inconvenience themselves to avoid it. But you probably don't want to build a mass market business on that.

Vegan products are mass market commodity goods like any grocery. Just because vegan goods consist of a smaller slice of all grocery and food sales doesn't mean you'd be a fool to make a business out of it.

Point. But I don't think the MPAA and RIAA are after the market of "people who find it more unethical to pirate than they find it inconvenient to consume legally"

I'm not sure the comparison is just. Using animal products isn't illegal.

I don't think ethics overlaps much with law.

Aw, come on, don't sound like a troll. Don't argue for the sake of arguing. THere is a big overlap between ethics and laws. Just because some items don't overlap doesn't warrant such a statement.

Seriously? Theft, Assault, Civil Liability etc.. I think there's a significant overlap between Ethics and Law. Our systems of laws are based on the work of philosophers studying ethics, of course there's a huge overlap

There's also offshore tax havens, political action committees, and patent trolls. Some unethical things are legal.

There's also underage sexting, media piracy, cryptocurrencies, and marijuana. Some things aren't globally agreed upon as ethical or unethical, but the law still attempts to address them.

Identifying the overlap is difficult.

people create laws to enforce ethics, but ethics and laws and law often don't overlap because law gets tinkered with less than ethical people and one man's justice is another man's horror.

I agree with you, they definitely don't match exactly. But I was arguing that they overlap: Some parts match, or at leats cover the same ground.

And that's the problem - you might as well keep pirating as Spotify isn't helping any artist while users think they're doing the noble thing.

Spotify is legal and the artists on the platform are on there of their own free will (or their publishers will who they signed that right away to).

They could decide that they on want to steam on another platform if that is a better deal for them.

Absolutely, and many smaller artists and indie labels chose not to offer their catalogue on those platforms.

I didn't intend to offend the users of streaming services. I subscribed to rdio myself, only as a tastemaker though - I still buy a lot of lossless music.

But people don't listen to music to benefit the artists (even when they purchase a CD or whatever) -- they do it for themselves.

Artists make the vast majority of their money on tour, which is more or less unrelated to the choice of distribution channel, except that a more prolific channel results in more people attending a show.

That point is brought up often, but don't forget that while touring might work for your average indie rockband, it's not as easy for obscure ambient, experimental musicians. Music that is primarily intended for home listening is a lot harder to sell as live performance.

Again, I don't intend to offend the users of those services - just saying that Spotify, rdio and co. alone won't work for many artists.