Why did the camera, props, lighting and other workers contribute to the movie, if they weren't getting paid? How could they afford to?
In reality, of course, only the movie companies, some writers and a few big stars rely on percentages - the rest work for wages or get up-front money.
So your argument comes down to the special case where A puts out a recorded work, counting on royalties to pay for it, then B makes unauthorized copies - then A suffers, in some sense, a loss of the hypothetical revenue.
But wait, did B agree to pay? If there was no contract between A and B, then the supposed moral/ethical case for making B pay is reduced to "because the legislators said so". And if tomorrow the legislators grant a private monopoly on air to Monsanto, then by your reasoning we all suddenly become thieves.
There is a natural-rights case for copyright, but it extends only to the actual creators, and covers basically only correct attribution (as per some European laws [1]).
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.
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.
And you're talking about a very new funding model. I'm not saying there are necessarily lots of examples of great movies already produced with this model. I'm saying they could easily be. A good number of projects have raised millions on kickstarter [1], including two movies [2, 3].
There's no reason the movie industry couldn't move to a pre-funding model. Or some other model nobody has thought of yet.
[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/most-funded
[2] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1869987317/wish-i-was-h...
[3] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spikelee/the-newest-hot...
Another idea which I think has promise is payment by social conventions. Tipping culture in the US is like this: you are not legally required to pay waitstaff, but everyone does because they would be considered assholes if they didn't. People joke that it's ridiculous that rock bands and web cartoonists make most of their money selling t-shirts, but actually if we are aiming for social pressure t-shirts are the ideal currency---everyone you interact with in your daily life can see that you bought one. So if we got a convention going that "if you regularly read a webcomic you oughta buy the t-shirt", then it would be easy to ostracize the people who violate it.
U.S. IP law is so outdated and in need of major reforms.
We may still have 12 years a slave but maybe not at the same level of quality.
I don't have HBO so I don't watch Game of Thrones. It's not like my life suffers immensely because I can't consume it. There are plenty of other forms of culture and entertainment in the world that I use to occupy my time.
