The cost of duplication was never a large part of the equation. If you could get theaters to book the picture then the additional 35mm prints were paid for. You could open a film across 3000 screens for $5 million. Likewise duplication on DVD or Blu-ray disc is a tiny part of video distributors' outlay. It's the first print/disc master that costs money to produce. Duplication expenses are like 5% of the overhead, unless someone has horrendously miscalculated.
If you wan't to be moral just download the torrent, track down guys who actually created the art and send them some cash.
Protip: this never happens. Look at the credits of a movie, see that long list of names at the end; the vast majority of those people put in a fair amount of work to get the picture made. Nobody wants to write out 150 checks to different people who helped along the way, that's part of the producers' job. Even the shittiest no-budget straight-to-video film shot with a prosumer camera represents 2-3 man-years of work.
So it's better to pay some other guy that set up whole unnecessary and obsolete delivery chain instead of picking one of those 150 guys at random?
And you're not just paying 'some other guy' - as i pointed out, when you purchase a ticket or buy a DVD it goes to someone who is contractually obliged to pay either day rates or residuals or some combination of the two to the people who work on the film. That's why you see accountants and legal people listed in the movie credits, a significant part of their job is making sure that people are paid in a timely fashion.
If you don't want to pay the distributor, then the distributor can't pay the producer, and if you the producer doesn't get his/her share of your money then there's nothing to pass on to anyone else. Your individual purchase is a tiny amount but in the aggregate those purchases pay people's wages and residual income and allows them to make a living. Stop with the Robin Hood arguments, they're bullshit.
What's that have to do with copyright? Are the theaters subsidized by copyright? They surely have advertisements subsidized by copyright. Advertisements, that convince a lot of people, that don't actually care that much about 60 ft screen, that they do.
Most of the people who do stuff for the movie don't wait for the income from tickets dvd-s and whatevers. They get pay for the job they do when the do it and as little and as late as possible. They are paid with the money of some people who don't have a better idea what to do with their money than to invest in a movie. They pay up front and they trust that they'll get more back thanks to the whole byzantine system that has its foundation shaken by the advancement in technology. Same kind of advancement that allowed this behemoth to be created in the first place.
Propping up those foundations in manufactured morality is not healthy.
Not sure what's the parallel between my arguments and Robin Hood. Care to elaborate?
Years ago copies required infrastructure to make them and they were almost only means of distribution of information and you could hide the fraction of the cost of creation of this information in the price of a copy. That's no longer viable strategy. Sooner people get that, sooner we'll get more honest future.
Clean copy costs nothing. If a copy costs you then it's the cost of material waste plus cost of intellectual waste (DRM) plus fraction of the cost of the creation of this information plus healthy share for guys who set up all this chain to profit from it while creating nothing apart from this business model.
If you wan't to be moral just download the torrent, track down guys who actually created the art and send them some cash.