In my completely uneducated view of the world, this situation is different because, whichever supermarket you pay at, you're cashing in on the skill and time which you previously contributed to society. You're also "voting with your dollar" and giving society some feedback about what it needs less and more of.
When you take something without paying for it, and that thing has a price, then you're saying that society owes you more than what it has judged your own value to be. That price of that object has been set relative to the price of your wages, in a long process of trial and error. Others need to work in order to pay for this thing, but you don't think that you do. That's how I see it from a moral standpoint.
I'm not following your train of thought in the second paragraph, but the statement "copying is needing" needs more qualification. And on the topic of needing: if you truly don't need something, then you should in fact let society "cut the fat". But if there was no one to make the software that you pirated, and if you actually never got to use the thing which you claim (I think) not to need, then would you have been just as happy? I think, if you use something that you "don't need", then you're just lying.
My own restaurant analogy for this is that piracy would be like a very stupidly run restaurant opening a free all-you-can-eat buffet out back, in addition to a full price menu. In the absence of a disincentive, no self-serving person would pay full price.
The supply of copyable software is infinite, but not the supply of time needed to make it. In order to make sure that B isn't undervalued, we can do any of the following:
- Artificially limit supply of A (drm).
- Find someone who values A more than you do (advertisers).
- Make people pay for B rather than for A (kickstarter).
You bring some interesting points so let start with the moral standpoint. If voting with your dollar should be the method to give society feedback what is needed, roads and water should be the most expensive items one pay for. Voting with your dollar sound fine in theory, but try to find a single study proving it. There is none, and studies like "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism" by Economist George Akerlof, and those produced by Amartya Sen should shine some light on why.
Copying is as simple as needing, that is the amount of energy and action needed to copy something, is about the same as just simply needing something. Like star trek replicators, you ask for something, and a perfect copy materialize. If I was hungry and I asked the replicator for a piece of bread, would I be depriving the baker of salary?
So the question ends up, how should the baker be payed for the first loaf of bread. A dollar for each copy made from it? When the poor is then denied said bread and dies because he does not have that dollar for a copy, is that then murder or good for society?
So how do we make it valuable to develop. My answer would be:
- Society should pay for infrastructure, be that roads, water, or network infrastructure. (Tax)
- Industry regulations should regulate the industry, not private people. If a company want to do earn profit by using software made by others, they should pay. (CC-BY-NC)
- Concepts like media tax would work quite fine, if distributed "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". The current media tax seen at places like Canada and Sweden are twisted forms of that where the collectors take the largest share, and then popularity in radio takes the rest. (Media tax).
- Products do compete against free and sometimes wins. Look at the "$9.99" bin at the supermarket. When the product is offered as convenience, it does not matter if at the back, down the stairs, through the window, next to the gutter, there is a "free all-you-can-eat buffet" of pirated goods. This goes back to Industry regulations. Regulate people who are running for-profit operations and that is enough to create value for the producer. (lets call that economics)
When you take something without paying for it, and that thing has a price, then you're saying that society owes you more than what it has judged your own value to be. That price of that object has been set relative to the price of your wages, in a long process of trial and error. Others need to work in order to pay for this thing, but you don't think that you do. That's how I see it from a moral standpoint.
I'm not following your train of thought in the second paragraph, but the statement "copying is needing" needs more qualification. And on the topic of needing: if you truly don't need something, then you should in fact let society "cut the fat". But if there was no one to make the software that you pirated, and if you actually never got to use the thing which you claim (I think) not to need, then would you have been just as happy? I think, if you use something that you "don't need", then you're just lying.
My own restaurant analogy for this is that piracy would be like a very stupidly run restaurant opening a free all-you-can-eat buffet out back, in addition to a full price menu. In the absence of a disincentive, no self-serving person would pay full price.
The supply of copyable software is infinite, but not the supply of time needed to make it. In order to make sure that B isn't undervalued, we can do any of the following:
- Artificially limit supply of A (drm).
- Find someone who values A more than you do (advertisers).
- Make people pay for B rather than for A (kickstarter).