It seems pretty apparent to me that sooner than most people realize capitalism as its been practiced for essentially all of human history won't be sustainable any more. Technological improvements create wealth out of thin air, but the economic system can easily turn this windfall into a negative for humanity. As technology makes stuff steadily cheaper the value of labor steadily drops while the value of capital increases as it requires less labor to generate more wealth. You've essentially end up with the people who own the robots that make the wealth (capital) on one side and on the other all the people who lack capital and need a "job" to support themselves. There's a lot of handwringing about a 10% unemployment rate in the US, what happens when we have 20% of the population that is *unemployable* at a wage which they can support themselves? 30%? 40%? What's the breaking point? Robots/computers/self driving cars don't need to replace all the engineers and doctors, our entire economic system will collapse once you can't earn a living in retail/food/manufacturing or anything else that doesn't require you to be above averagely smart. Its tragic that this seems like such a likely outcome of us generating more wealth than we ever have before. We just need to come up with a paradigm shift in how we distribute wealth, and good luck doing that without a hell of a lot of bloodshed. :/

What's the value of the water you need to drink to survive? It's pretty ridiculous to ignore available supply in considering the price of something.

The 'right to consume' as you put it is granted by natural law in the case of piracy. Humans have evolved to copy information liberally because the benefit of knowing where the good hunting is vastly out weights the cost of describing it. The artificial constraint of copyright is unnatural and goes against human nature. There is absolutely nothing immoral about copying things and the moral outrage seems to stem from this unnatural feeling that copying is theft. I'm not going to rehash arguments you've certainly already heard but let me ask you this: if there's a product that I'm not going to buy for the price/conditions it's offered at how is the world a better place by me doing without it? This has nothing to do with morality or theft because NOBODY WAS DEPRIVED OF ANYTHING. The morality issue does get a bit more murky if you're talking about something that you would have bought but instead pirated, but that seems to be a fairly small percentage of piracy and I'm unconvinced that its not largely offset by the free marketing piracy generates.

I don't know, interactions between multiple actors are often more complicated than can really be boiled down to "this one thing is the cause".
Consider a similar kind of a spectrum of vaguely analogous examples.

If you pick up and play with a wild bear cub, is it the mother bear that "caused" the consequent mauling? The fact that you didn't know anything about bears isn't really a consideration for that question.

If walk through a rough part of time screaming "NIGGERS ARE WORTHLESS", what would you say "caused" you to end up in the hospital? The fact that we're talking about humans rather than bears doesn't really change the fact that even human animals will generally react in a certain way to certain stimulus.

And, to complete the arc, if you through social awkwardness or ignorance put yourself in a position of high risk to be bullied or raped - the fact that it's unintentional doesn't really alter the fact that your actions are part of the "cause" of the result.

I'm certainly not excusing the aggressor, just questioning the absolute "bullies cause bullying", "rapists cause rape". "Victim-blaming" is a very charged phrase that tries to frame the discussion in a very slanted way when what I think is really being said is that the aggressor should be punished *and* the victim educated on how to deal with strange dogs without being bit...or whatever. Claiming the victim had no part in "causing" the problem and has no responsibility is just ignoring the second half of that.

Yes, this is my experience with the game. I'm excited because of Bioware's pedigree, so I not only pre-order the game (something I rarely do) I also spring for the collectors edition with all the DLC. Release day, I excitedly download the game only to be hit with some bug related to their authentication servers not communicating amongst themselves which apparently hit most of the people who bought the game through stardock. After over an hour bounced around among various support people who didn't have any idea what was going on they said they'd get back to me. 4 days later they did. Meanwhile I get fed up and - timed it - spent 3.5 minutes to locate, download, install and launch a crack.

As a double strong "fuck you customer", not only can you not access the DLC without an active net connection, you can't play your save game which has touched the DLC, so assuming you don't want to just start a brand new game you can't play your game at all. So the other day when my flaky ISP is down and I can't do much else with my computer I figure it's a good time to play the new single player game I got. "Fuck you customer! You really should have just pirated the whole thing" Great job EA, I would love to support great games like this with my dollars but this is the last cent you'll ever get from me. You make it so....much...more...painful to actually buy the game.

So, since the concept of intellectual property exists solely to incentivize the creation of *stuff*, how exactly can you justify the patents/copyrights for all those "lost" sales?