Re : Econ 101 -- VT
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If producers can find a way not to pay actors, a lot of them won't. If there's a way to sneak into a movie for free without getting caught, a lot of moviegoers will. It's the same all the way down the chain. And very few if any of those people will feel guilty about it. File sharing is no different, except that it's less selfish. Sure, it's cheating the video producers, in the usual sense. It's as if the user played the videos on a big-screen TV in his front yard and the yard was visible to the whole world. That would also be illegal, since it would count as a public exhibition. But it feels as if it _should_ be legal. That usually means a case can be made for it philosophically. For example: Laws that limit distribution and exhibition are designed to profit distributors and exhibitors, not to benefit the public. True, if they didn't profit, they wouldn't perform the service, and the public would be deprived of it. However, whenever they profit more by withholding or rationing the service, they will, and the public is deprived anyway. Maybe that arrangement doesn't serve the public interest best. There's probably a whole literature of business ethics discussing questions like this.
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