There is one thing I beleive is making you talk past the others disagreeing
with you about this issue. When you frame it like that, you are regarding
something that doesn't have a physical form per se (culture and all it's
expressions) as something that can actually be stolen. When you make a
business of recording a cultural expression into a convenient physical form
so you can deliver it, and you steal that form of delivery, that is one
thing. When you find an alternative to that delivery system to access the
cultural expression itself, the problem is not stealing something, it's just
that the middle man changed.
You are disregarding some facts that people already linked here when they
show that recent movies are still selling tickets, that the majority of
people who share music learn to love music and still buy them and, more
importantly, go to concerts (who generate more money for artists then records
themselves for the large majority of small artists, which I know a few and
can confirm this). So this is not about making artists poor and ruining
families, you can know this looking around and seeing that artists are still
able to produce cultural expressions and sometimes make a living out of it.
Record companies and studios are still functioning and producing. It hurts
the profits, not the production per se.
When you frame this as a criminal act, you are taking a position along with
those who want to continue a business model that is out of date with how
people are actually sharing culture today. It's actually a good thing that
record companies and producers are no longer capable of enforcing an
artificial scarcity of cultural expressions so they can profit on it. The
free software movement is also about fighting a form of artificial scarcity.
This kind of business model transition, with all the conflict, is actually
common in history. Hollywood itself was born when some people were trying to
escape an enforcement of artificial scarcity on the technology used to make
color motion pictures:
https://www.apertus.org/independent-filmmaking-history-article
All I'm trying to say is that there are a lot of grey areas on this issue,
and claiming it's only a criminal act is framing a very small part of it.
