Manga site operators borne the risks, not the users. Also, private channels effectively reduce risks effectively to zero.
There are also non-monetary costs to pirating, which are mostly viruses and time. However, they don't generally count toward monetary price, but they are cost nonetheless.
That being said, most people don't get caught anyway. So the risk is effectively zero.
>Pirates, by copying and distributing their music for them, are actually adding value to their art.
Except where they don't add value by pirating something they otherwise would have paid for if it wasn't easily available to pirate with hardly any downside risk.
Yes, because the potential damage is much more severe. If someone pirates a movie, the damage is about the price of a movie ticket. If someone's private data gets stolen, it can ruin their entire life.
On the other hand, not consuming the content vs pirating it doesn't change the outcome for the creator - if anything, piracy is slightly better as it still keeps the content relevant in the collective mindshare so that others who don't pirate (either due to moral or technical reasons) might buy said content.
>And how is this economically different from piracy, which mostly goes unprotected?
That this is not even illegal at all.
And piracy in business settings is much more seriously and effectively prosecuted. Pirating at an enterprise is nothing like the free-for-all of pirating music or movies at home.
In some cases, pirate sites do have a cost to be able to fund operations and maintain quality, but one way or another, the customer pays something to someone (even if it's just access to internet via their ISP) and receives a product. So yes.
There is a rule in piracy that you shouldn’t sell access to pirated content. It should be free as in freedom. Selling content is more damaging to the rights holders than mere torrents or cyberlocker content IMHO. I mean offering it for free is still damaging, but profiteering rackets are usually frowned upon in the piracy community
1) If the costs of distribution are high enough that rights holders will not make a profit, they may cease distribution to avoid the loss. This is fine and fair and good.
2) Distribution by others at that point by definition represents no loss to the rights holder, so long as there is no marginal cost to the rights holder. For example, an online game may represent a continuing marginal cost to the rights holder if they are still running servers, but pirating a movie represents zero marginal cost.
3) Therefore, it is not immoral to pirate a work where the rights holder has made it impossible to obtain the film through legal, profit generating channels.
------- LINE OF MORAL AMBIGUITY -------
4) Where a rights holder makes it unreasonably difficult to obtain a work, either through price, geographical distribution or unnecessary technical encumberment, one may cease to be a potential profit generating customer of the rights holder.
5) Therefore, pirating (again with 0 marginal cost to the rights holder) is not immoral, as the rights holder is not losing potential profit as a result.
There are also non-monetary costs to pirating, which are mostly viruses and time. However, they don't generally count toward monetary price, but they are cost nonetheless.
That being said, most people don't get caught anyway. So the risk is effectively zero.
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