story
1. You hijack the taxi and demand the driver take you to your destination for free. This creates an equivalent or better experience for the consumer at zero or near-zero cost.
2. Instead of clicking a button and watching 12 Years a Slave, you get a crudely animated version pieced together by drawings crowdsourced from 1st grade students around the nation, and voiced entirely by Gilbert Gottfried.
Sure the cameraman already got paid for the film you just pirated, but if said film doesn't earn enough then the studio will decide to make fewer films or go bankrupt, either of which could cost the cameraman their job and significantly reduce future earning potential.
If only one person thinks that way, and pirates a movie, your statement holds true.
If 1,000 people think that way, it probably still holds true.
Extending this, however, you reach an obvious tipping point, where a critical mass of people pirate the movie and the production costs are not recouped (and the cameraman is out of work and his children starve in the street).
It's the logical conclusion of your line of thinking. What if everybody believed pirating the movies they want to watch will not affect the cameramen. What if nobody paid for the movies they're watching? Obviously, high-budget movies would no longer be possible, and we'd all be reduced to watching shoe-string-budget art house shlock (I know, I know... Primer).
Obviously, that is not sustainable. So what makes you special? Why should you not pay for the movie you're watching, while other people should foot the bill?
For completeness, this is true only if the consumer prefers the taxi ride over walking and considers it to be a better experience.
> 2. Instead of clicking a button and watching 12 Years a Slave, you get a crudely animated version pieced together by drawings crowdsourced from 1st grade students around the nation, and voiced entirely by Gilbert Gottfried.
A counterpoint to this is Primer ($7,000 budget, 70% RT, 7.0 IMDb): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_(film)
(You can still watch old movies of course, so if you restrict your downloading to old movies, and not fairly recent releases, your argument works.)
If we stopped making new movies, would people learn to appreciate older classical films they'd never considered before? Surely there have already been more movies produced than a person could consume in a single lifetime, though it's debatable whether or not most of them are worth viewing at all.
Once the medium platues (or long enough after to build up a supply), then this would work.
The argument being that art is intensely connected to the time in which it is created, and the function of art in the context of the progression of humanity requires that artists constantly make new art for the current generation.
It's not like people are making professional-grade movies now in the free time, as they are now driving around cities with their own cars. Likewise, not everyone is trained to make movies as most adults are already trained to drive cars.
