I agree, as many people here, when you suggest positive actions to the
question of producing and sharing content. This has a lot of value, but it
doesn't address the fact that people want to participate on their own
culture, even if it is a culture of blockbusters. Some people like pop
culture/music, including famous artists, and this is not necessarily
available in alterative forms of sharing. It's not helping your argument when
you try to say what are people's intentions when they share a blockbuster
because you don't really know (or you are not posting the source of your
statement).
And, just as in the case of free software, I'm neither a musician nor a
programmer. So I try to contribute in other ways when I want to share on what
is produced by them.
Let me try to put it in clearer terms: when I talk about artificial scarcity,
I'm trying to point to an unbalanced power relation. When I suggest that one
of the goals of free software is to try to fight a form of artificial
scarcity, it's because it's trying to give power back to users and try to
make them notice giving away this power is bad in the first place.
You try to picture ruined families and broken artists because of sharing, but
the facts on the ground are that power is still highly concentrated on the
hands of those who make a business in distributing culture (the middle man),
and thus money is also concentrated in their hands (as posted here by
others). Artists are struggling to make a living for decades, way before the
internet, not just recently or since Napster. The reason is that if they
wanted to be famous they needed the absuive contracts that are still part of
the industry (Editors/Producers/Recorders).
In your arguments you are failing to address this question of power
inbalance, even when mentioned that the same industry that now claims damages
on their profits (Hollywood) once was being choked by the same dynamic and
tried to get away too.
