1. is painfully true. Movies and music cost money to make, and that money is recouped by sales. We can talk about profiteering and Hollywood accounting and the

1. is painfully true. Movies and music cost money to make, and that money is recouped by sales. We can talk about profiteering and Hollywood accounting and the like, but fundamentally sales still fuel production. Academic work also costs money, but journals have tricked someone else into paying for it. Research gets done on government, corporate, and university budgets, submitters get no compensation, and reviewers do the hard work behind publication for free. Journals have been priced far above costs for decades, but with the advent of online distribution costs have sunk even further while prices continue to rise. The best (moral) argument against piracy was always "if everyone does this, we won't get more media". That's not even true in the case of journals: it looks an awful lot like the system would find a way to work even at 100% piracy rates.