Easily duplicable cultural products? You’re suggesting that you should be able to take something someone else made because it’s easy to do? It would be easy to steal your computer from you — should that make it legal for me to do so? You think movies should become historic cultural relics with free access to all whenever they are popular? If your wish came true, how exactly would the movie’s creation get funded in the first place? Movies often costs tens to hundreds of millions to produce, and they only take on that level of risk because of the financial return of people who pay to watch them. How do you think that would work if movies were free to everyone?
Do you have a job? Do you work for a company that makes money? Would you be okay with the product you’re working on being taken for free by people who insist they shouldn’t have to pay for it?
Your language feels really very hyperbolic to me. There are many real people with real jobs trying to make livings, even if the corporations they work for are greedy. DRM can indeed be shitty and it often oversteps copyright, but we can ignore DRM here because the argument you’re actually making is one against respecting copyright law and against respecting artists.
> is it actually good to anyone in any way to have a business based around forbidding free access to easily duplicable cultural products? Should such a thing even be allowed to thrive?
Yes. The answer is yes, without question. This has been debated by scholars and lawmakers and artists and business people for hundreds of years, and we have a compendium of laws that protect the people who make content precisely because it does, in fact, do them some good.
See Chesterton’s Fence: you don’t get to nuke the existing system until you actually understand why it’s there and how it got there. If you believe it serves zero people but still manages to exist, that means that your belief is wrong and you need to do some research.
The biggest problem with your argument is you’re blindly focused on the execs and profits of only the very largest media conglomerates, and you’re ignoring not only the tens of thousands of artists they employ, but you’re also ignoring all smaller businesses that aren’t making enormous profits and can’t afford to give away their content for free.
> movies lose otherwise hilarious amounts of money all the time and they seem to still exist somehow.
The amount of money someone makes is not any of your business, and it does not justify stealing the things they make without their permission. Copyright law can and does apply even to works that don’t cost money, and it also applies equally when someone’s enjoying handsome profits. You are not legally invited to copy anything based on someone else’s income.
Studios sometimes do lose money on movies and they survive because they make multiple movies. Studios also sometimes report misleading sales figures. I’ve worked in films and games as an artist, and watched studios do “creative accounting”. Reports of losses don’t prove anything, and don’t justify breaking copyright law.