Groceries are vital. That doesn't mean I get them for free. I need access to the roads as well, which is why I pay taxes. Producing this stuff costs money, and

Groceries are vital. That doesn't mean I get them for free. I need access to the roads as well, which is why I pay taxes. Producing this stuff costs money, and those costs are expected to be carried by the people benefiting. Cultural works are exactly that - works. They represent tremendous concentrations of time, energy, talent, pain, risk, and resources. The fact that the up-front costs are high while the marginal costs of duplication and distribution are negligible in no way changes this basic proposition: this stuff costs money. Lots and lots of money. And that means it needs to be paid for. If people don't like paying for copies, then what? By what precise mechanism are they going to transfer non-trivial sums of money from themselves to the people who produce the work? Also, where's the enforcement to handle those who don't? Grocers, after all, only have to worry about attracting honest customers. If they catch someone stealing, they don't take it upon themselves to neutralize this threat to their business. They just call the cops. Throwing the idiots in jail isn't their problem. So what do you do about people who steal from artists? Are these folks expected to operate without the legal protections that the rest of society takes for granted? Note, I'm not talking about stealing media, which is hard to steal in the strict sense due to its infinite reproducibility. I'm talking about stealing money, which is what people do when they make a copy they don't pay for, since the act of copying - by law - simultaneously creates an legal obligation to pay the author. But if people just decide to keep the money in their pockets, then they're holding onto something that is no longer theirs. And that's stealing. It's like writing a check. The money to pay it may sit in their accounts for a few days until the check clears, but if they spend it on something else and cause the check to bounce, they've done something criminal. Likewise, if they make a copy, but spend the money they now owe on a cup of coffee instead, they've just screwed the artist out of cash to which he he's legally entitled. And if everybody does this, then the artist is really in trouble. After all, media may be endlessly reproducible, but money isn't. People can copy artist's work freely, but artist's can't "copy" the money in their audiences accounts, even when they're legally entitled to a portion of it. Obviously, the creation of a legal debt to the artist is not triggered by every act of of copying. But assuming we're not talking about something covered by fair use, in the public domain, etc. then making copies absolutely means creating obligations to pay for them - which people widely and habitually disregard. At present, we're functioning on the honor system. And as any established commercial concern will tell you, this turns out to be a really shitty business model.