Well, if you're saying that free market capitalism is flawed and makes piracy appealing, I totally agree with you.
I wouldn't say it's flawed in the "there's something wrong with it" manner, but rather there are simple facts about how the world works:
- The world has finite, very unevenly distributed, and always changing resources.
- Our power to distribute those resources is very limited.
- Our power to distribute those resources are effected by politics, economics, ethics, culture, and many other things.
- Frankly, no system we have devised is perfect, and with the sheer number variables involved on many levels, no system ever will be.
By denying that some people should be able to access that discourse, you're denying them access to their own culture. By saying that poor people have less right to access their own culture, you're reinforcing the system that justifies maintaining their lower economic status.
Except that economic status shouldn't be (and often isn't) determined by culture. Sadly, enough, in some courties, yes, they may still have class system, but in places like the USA, the class mobility can often be amazing. My own family has gone from borderline poor to upper middle class.
One thing I'd like to do is to point out is the difference between being poor temporarily and being poor permanently.
Because most of the time, "poor" people are only poor for a short period of time. They're between jobs or had unexpected expenses or something similar in nature. They're "poor" but only temporarily, and they can afford to cut back on entertainment expenses temporarily while they resolve their situation.
I'd also like to point out that "poor" often becomes rather blurry when you're talking about people who have good incomes but also have large debts. They may not have a lot of money when the number are crunched, but they have a lot of purchasing power. I would put myself into this category: When I graduate from college, I'll literally have huge education debts. But with the degree I'm getting, I'll be able to maintain a job that pays quite a bit and will have decent purchasing power. So I'm "poor" in the sense that I owe more than I have, but not poor in the sense that I can't afford much.
When you're talking about truly poor people - people who are poor permanently and don't have access to much purchasing power - I find that most of the time, the reason is not because of free market economics. It's often legal issues or corruption issues.
When my family was poor we lived in a place where there were huge corruption issues, where the wealthy hoarded and did not give much back to the economy, and where there wasn't much access to global economics (or frankly even national economics). Luckily, we were able to leave that area and my father found a new job. The condition of being poor was tied to the area, and could be overcome simply by moving.
I also know of a friend where he has huge expenses and where he loses his disability payments if he maintains a real job. He's poor because of some very backwards laws that forces him into a position where he cannot get a job because he'd need an extremely well paying job pay for his medications. He can't even get a job to supplement his own fixed income. He's not poor because of free market economics - he's poor because of a very backwards legal system that prevents him from exploring the job market freely, and maximizes the risks of looking for and having a job.
. . . and oh, yeah, talking about maximizing stuff - the drug system we have does something very interesting. It increases innovation at the expense of cost. Our drugs could be much cheaper - just get rid of patenting drugs. It's the temporary monopoly of the patent that makes them so expensive.
Anyways, I guess my point is that being "poor" isn't as cut and dry as some may think, and IMHO the truly, truly poor people are not poor because of free market economics. They are poor because some other system is preventing free market economics and capitalism from working.
The best way to think about economics IMHO is in a "checks and balances" sort of way, using feedback loops. This is called "Adam Smith's invisible hand" in economics books, and is frequently poorly interpreted. Adam Smith himself probably didn't fully understand the nature of the "invisible hand."
The idea is not to have truly "free" economics, but to have economics with a minimal set of rules that promote a healthy economic system.
One of the primary principles of economics is the integrity of the transaction - that a good or a service is exchanged for money (or something of equivalent value). So we need a set of rules to ensure the integrity of the transaction.
If the integrity of that transaction is broken via theft, then trust is lost and the seller is forced to do one or two things: Either increase the price to offset the loss, or close the business.
You know what I fear? I fear that we're going to have a depression in the software bisuness. We're going to see a growing trend of developers simply closing shop, and those who don't will turn into vertical markets, with prices reaching astronomical levels. As in you may have to pay 10 to 100x as you do now for the software. I can see that happening, and I'm surprised it's lasted this long without collapsing.
No matter how you argue it, economics is economics. You need resources to create software. Lots of resources. Time, money, computers, humans, etc. It's not cheap by any means.
Money is simply a way of provinding those resources, because money is what allows the software company to buy the resources they need.
Think of money is a generic device. Forget that it's money. It's a resource-giving device. This device is given by many people to an entity that they want to provde them with a product. So they supply this resource-giving device to a company, and in exchange, the entity uses the resource-giving device to give them resources needed to create the product, which they then give back to the people.
Now, the entity needs more resource-giving devices in order to supply future products. So it needs to increase the number of resource-giving devices it is receiving.
So, how do we supply more resource-giving units to the entity? Well, there are two ways: The first way is to have each person who is already giving resource-giving units to the entity to send more resource-giving units to the entity. The second way is to increase the number of people giving resource-giving units to the entity.
So that's where we stand.
Software companies need more money. There are two ways to do this: Increase price, or increase the number of people paying. I don't see a third option, and if you think there is, feel free to discuss it.