hang on no this is infuriating

because what is truly remarkable about the ability to download music, tv, etc is that nothing is lost

when you steal, say, a dress from a store, now no one else can have that dress

it’s essentially wasted work that’s gone uncompensated

but when you download a song, that doesn’t forbid other people from downloading that song.  it still exists as that file wherever you got it from.  it’s less like you went into a store and stole a dress than if you went into a store, made a perfect copy of the dress, and walked out with that

now, obviously society is not yet ready to exist in a world where you make one copy of something and then it can be perfectly replicated on an infinite scale without compensation.  there have to be some structures in place to make sure that people are properly paid for their work.  that’s completely true, and the ethics/legalities of downloading are extremely complicated. 

but to suggest that the idea of doing so, of making everything instantly available to everyone at no loss to anyone, is inherently evil, is just creating a stranglehold of the few over the many

i would love to live in a world where you could download a pizza, not just because i would like a pizza but because you know if you could replicate food on an infinite scale it would solve a lot of fucking problems.