The problem is the attitude, "I want to get everything and pay for nothing with no sacrifice while being paid as much as possible!" ~ Everyone. It really is what's killing us. If people wouldn't listen to ignore 30 seconds of commercial for about 30 minutes of entertainment (some songs are longer than others), then we really are screwed.
Honestly, I don't think that's what's killing us. I think it's fine when the poor want that, because they're already sacrificing, and wanting to gain money with little sacrifice isn't a fundamental problem. The problem is when the people
who aren't poor take that route.
The fact remains that I do not want to listen to a 30-second ad for 30 minutes of TV, and that an ad placed there is doing nothing but wasting people's time. I'm not going to buy the product, I'm not going to look at the product, I'm not going to think about the product. The company gets the illusion that they're getting something, and I get a little bit more weariness and irritation added to my day with no positive result, save perhaps resentment to whoever is bothering me with an unimaginative and boring ad (note: I have no problems with most of the ads on Japanese television, possibly because they're usually vastly shorter)--which is not something that people should be funding for its own sake.
Which is where we lead into...
Piracy is completely theft and is directly related to how anonymity, ease, and peer-pressure are known to loosen an individual's moral standards on things like theft.
This is not about the right or wrongness of piracy, but about the proposed business model. I agree with Nadaka on the idea of copyright. In the era of mass production and mass distribution, the fact remains that we will have piracy, right or wrong, and the smart creators are going to be thinking just about now about how to make money in different ways. We know that DRM doesn't work, because the American public
is not lazy and
will crack it.
Truean, you're right. You don't get something for nothing. The price for gaining access to X artist's work is supporting the artist so that they can continue work. But we have all this stuff obscuring that, and making it unclear, places where large distribution companies are taking an undeservedly large cut.
When the public creates a relationship with a creator and understands that they are responsible for his or her continued ability to create, then either
a. They will support that creator or
b. They won't.
And the thing is, that if that creator is doing good work and works hard to also create a relationship with the fans (to create for their audience, that is to say society, to pass a message, to say "there is someone here behind the product," that is to say--to turn themselves into a brand), people will funnel them money to keep the art coming. Many of them will go out of their way to crowd-control knockoffs of the creator's work, and organize boycotts. They also often create a fanworks machine, which is excellent for both the creator and for the fans: the creator gets a huge proliferation of advertisement which doesn't feel at all obtrusive, often from heavy supporters of their work, and up-and-coming new artists plug into an audience that will likely also support their transition into original work.
Not everyone is going to get to be a big name artist whose livelihood will be entirely supported by the public. Most people
shouldn't be, and that's fine. The attitude of entitlement for everything we do is what's killing us, Truean. It's silly, and it heavily restricts the flow of ideas, of creation. The poor should have the same right of access to inspiration as the rich, as anyone else.
Oh, and one more thing: if we're all against viewing without paying, then are we going to abolish libraries? That's where I get most of my ad-free viewing! You might say it's different because you don't get to have something checked out for more than three weeks (or whatever), and because you have to wait until other people are done with the physical copy of a book or DVD sometimes, and due to late fines... but all those are due to the scarcity model of informational transfer.
What we have here is the new model of the Library of Alexandria, and we're trying to make it pay-per-view.