Artists - just like inventors etc - should be compensated for their work, but in my humble opinion not in what has become now essentially perpetuity.
So, an artist eeking out a living on something they worked hard on and released a month ago or two years ago gets sympathy from me. An artist who released a thing 20 years ago and still wants to eek out a living off that, such an artist doesn't really have my sympathy. The great-grandchildren who want to get paid for something an ancestor released 120 years ago[0]? Hell no, go do something yourself to make money.
If you're Lars Ulrich in 2000 and sue Napster over songs you released 10-20 years ago, while sitting on a net worth of maybe around 100-200M USD (now 350M), then my sympathy is with the pirates.
This doesn't touch the issue of how a lot of artists are not making much money, not because of pirates but because of predatory music labels and publishing houses.
It also ignores the problems with the "lost sales" theory. A lot of the pirates would have never paid for stuff they downloaded in the first place. And a lot of pirates started paying after pirating some stuff. E.g. I remember discovering a lot of artists from songs I illegally copied on LAN parties back in the day[1], usually artists too small to be on a lot of rotation on radio and MTV (yes, MTV used to have music, crazy) which I probably would have never known about otherwise. And I gave lots of money to these artists, buying their CDs, going to their concerts when possible, and so on. In the same vein, I discovered artists on whatcd and similar pirate places later on.
And doesn't touch on the "please take my money" issue... There are a lot of things that are out of print, etc, that you cannot pay for. E.g. large companies holding licenses to content may even take works out of print deliberately in tax avoiding schemes - I am not a Hollywood accountant, but from my limited understanding they can declare a loss when doing so which is worth a lot more in tax reduction than keeping a title in print.
And it also doesn't even touch humanity's need to preserve important cultural artifacts for the future.
[0] Remember, up to artists death + 70 years copyright term. While this exact scenario has probably not happened yet, as these rules are too new, you get a glimpse of what will happen in the future when you look about all the legal fighting still happening over Sherlock Holmes - a figure and body of worked created mostly before copyright law even existed.
[1] Yes, I am old. If you have no idea what a LAN party is, it's basically a bunch of people actually meeting in some venue with their computers, wire everything together into a temporary LAN, to play games and swap files, which back in the day really was the only sane way to do mulitplayer and filesharing stuff as internet speeds were so limited, and internet was usually very expensive, often still paying by the minute.
So, an artist eeking out a living on something they worked hard on and released a month ago or two years ago gets sympathy from me. An artist who released a thing 20 years ago and still wants to eek out a living off that, such an artist doesn't really have my sympathy. The great-grandchildren who want to get paid for something an ancestor released 120 years ago[0]? Hell no, go do something yourself to make money.
If you're Lars Ulrich in 2000 and sue Napster over songs you released 10-20 years ago, while sitting on a net worth of maybe around 100-200M USD (now 350M), then my sympathy is with the pirates.
This doesn't touch the issue of how a lot of artists are not making much money, not because of pirates but because of predatory music labels and publishing houses.
It also ignores the problems with the "lost sales" theory. A lot of the pirates would have never paid for stuff they downloaded in the first place. And a lot of pirates started paying after pirating some stuff. E.g. I remember discovering a lot of artists from songs I illegally copied on LAN parties back in the day[1], usually artists too small to be on a lot of rotation on radio and MTV (yes, MTV used to have music, crazy) which I probably would have never known about otherwise. And I gave lots of money to these artists, buying their CDs, going to their concerts when possible, and so on. In the same vein, I discovered artists on whatcd and similar pirate places later on.
And doesn't touch on the "please take my money" issue... There are a lot of things that are out of print, etc, that you cannot pay for. E.g. large companies holding licenses to content may even take works out of print deliberately in tax avoiding schemes - I am not a Hollywood accountant, but from my limited understanding they can declare a loss when doing so which is worth a lot more in tax reduction than keeping a title in print.
And it also doesn't even touch humanity's need to preserve important cultural artifacts for the future.
[0] Remember, up to artists death + 70 years copyright term. While this exact scenario has probably not happened yet, as these rules are too new, you get a glimpse of what will happen in the future when you look about all the legal fighting still happening over Sherlock Holmes - a figure and body of worked created mostly before copyright law even existed.
[1] Yes, I am old. If you have no idea what a LAN party is, it's basically a bunch of people actually meeting in some venue with their computers, wire everything together into a temporary LAN, to play games and swap files, which back in the day really was the only sane way to do mulitplayer and filesharing stuff as internet speeds were so limited, and internet was usually very expensive, often still paying by the minute.