Don't Make Me Steal

The fact that nobody would set up such a system is evidence that your analogy is unproductive, not that your argument is strong.

Of course it's not the same to duplicate information as it is to remove a physical item, but both are based on an artificial legal concept of property.

The natural state of things is indeed that I can copy any information coming my way, and copyright artificially restricts my right to do so in the eyes of the law.

Then again, the natural state of things is also that if you have a physical item and I want it, then if I am bigger than you/have a bigger gun than you/have more friends than you, then that item is now my possession and not yours, and theft-related statutes artificially restrict my right to take it in the eyes of the law.

In the end, copyright, like physical property, is an economic tool. Society gives it the force of law to make sure that people don't game the system unfairly. It makes no sense to debate that law, in either letter or spirit, without considering the economic implications of breaking it. Those implications are not zero just because information that already exists can be reproduced with near zero marginal cost and time overhead using modern technology.

I'm going to assert that the optimal pricing strategy for these goods is one of per-customer price discrimination, where the price is the highest one the customer can afford and at which the customer still values the content more than the opportunity cost foregone by exchanging money for it.

I would expect this to give an exponential distribution of prices: a few with a very high price, more with somewhat lower, and so on until a very long tail with a very low price (e.g. in the $0.0001 range).

This should give maximum profit to the seller of the content, and simultaneously maximize value for consumers of the content, because all consumers who want to view the product and can afford it get to watch it.

Of course, it assumes a market where arbitrage is impossible, and consumers don't revolt at getting different prices (which they will perceive to be "unfair").

So instead, we have a market with an arbitrary cut-off point for the lowest price segment. That leaves large numbers of marginal people who could get value from the content, but not so much value that they can afford to pay this particular cut-off point, or they can get other things which they perceive to give better value.

At the other end of the spectrum, at the highest price discrimination segments (fan packs, "ultimate" bundles etc.), the people with the most money are probably not being charged enough.

In effect, people who can afford to pay a high price are getting off light, while people who can't afford the lowest price are being excluded completely. Meanwhile, the seller of the content is not making as much money as they could.

Some would say that this is an unfair situation for everybody, except for the richest people.

There are alternative models of paying for content. For example, there could be a combination of a content usage monitoring system, a progressive tax collection mechanism, and redistribution to producers in proportion to how much is consumed.

But above all, I think it's important to get away from the idea that these goods are like physical goods, and getting them for very cheap or free is "stealing". It's intellectually dishonest.

Oh c'mon.