In a morally-equitable world, “I spent a lot of resources making this content. please pay before consuming it” means the artist and/or the artist’s team spent t

In a morally-equitable world, “I spent a lot of resources making this content. please pay before consuming it” means the artist and/or the artist’s team spent time honing their craft, money on food and housing, and some more money on materials. In the current world it’s rarely like this. Now it’s “we as a production conglomerate loaned an artist 500k to produce some content that we expect to make a profit on, made them use our very expensive in-house resources (at MSRP), and we pay them $0.03 for every $1 we make until they pay off that loan”. The perception those conglomerates want to spread is that there is a direct social contract between you and the artist who’s work you are pirating, but the real contract is between you and the conglomerate themselves. Even if (and usually especially if) that conglomerate screws over the artist.