Right, but that sort of problem is caused directly by the card industry's persistent failure to fix their systemic vulnerability. There is absolutely no reason in 2017 that anyone who can read a couple of details off a piece of plastic should be able to charge arbitrary amounts to someone's account without even having any sort of explicit authorisation from the account holder. The major card networks are the best placed organisations in the world to fix that problem, and in doing so to dramatically reduce financial crime, but since they mostly pass the buck when it comes to fraud liability onto the merchants anyway, they have limited incentives to invest in doing better.
Just about everyone goes through an intermediary rather than connecting directly with the card networks. That's how the system is set up.
Paying even 5% in card fees is extraordinary, though, unless you're an extremely high-risk customer (either due to the nature of your business or due to something like having a poor history of chargebacks that makes you look like a liability anyway).
May I ask where you are? Certainly with the business banking terms we typically see here in the UK, the fees heavily favour electronic transactions to the point that just putting cash into the bank or taking it out would be in the same range as typical card payment fees and the like. There are other accounts with lower fees for cash-based businesses, but they charge much higher fees for the electronic stuff.
It's true that we are far from an all-seeing eye kind of scenario - but it's also true that we are far from a cash-transaction, anonymous kind of scenario.
Agreed. I think it's important to be clear about where on the scale we're talking about, though, because there's definitely a problem with privacy issues, including those around payments, that campaigners overstate the risks in some cases and then the general public tunes out and ignores real risks elsewhere.
Actually, the costs of handling cash are typically significantly higher than the costs of processing electronic transactions, even for small businesses. We pay almost no fees for electronic transactions on our main bank accounts, but probably almost as much as the card fees would have been just to deposit the cash at the bank, for example, and that's before you even consider the costs of handling it and transporting physical money to and from a bank securely. There are good arguments for not going to an entirely cashless society, but for most businesses in most places this isn't going to be one of them.
It's always surprising how backward the US is when it comes to financial services and payment technology. For example, here in the UK, contactless payments for low value transactions have become ubiquitous within the past few years. You literally just tap your card on the machine and most of the time it just beeps to confirm the payment within a second or so and you're done. It's about the same with the alternatives that pay via your phone instead of an actual plastic card. Either way, it's faster and far less hassle than cash payments for all concerned. Even for transactions above the contactless limit, chip and PIN has been the standard here for a very long time, and again most of the time the transaction is confirmed within a couple of seconds. It's the same in much of Europe, and many other places in the world. For some reason, going by the comments I often see online, the US payments industry just seems to lag a decade or two behind the rest of the world. The technology itself can do much better.
Business just has to have the balls to raise their middle fingers to VISA. I've seen more than a few that are ATM and cash only.
That strategy doesn't hold up well with purchases increasingly taking place online rather than in bricks and mortar stores, though.
It's good that there are other options online -- PayPal being the 800lb gorilla, of course -- but often the same laws and regulations about consumer protections and fraud checks and so on wind up catching the alternative payment schemes anyway, and the same old problems rear their ugly heads again.
As someone who deals with these kinds of payments, the situation would be better for almost everyone if there weren't all these consumer protections (and therefore business risks) attached to non-cash payment methods, or even required by law in some cases.
You might think you're getting a good deal, but the reality is that they cause all kinds of problems with unreliable payments and false positives, which in turn waste absurd amounts of time for both businesses and customers, with the former obviously passing on their extra costs to the latter in higher prices.
Given that most businesses and most customers are basically honest about transactions, you often have legal safeguards in the cases where they aren't, and most businesses will want to put right any mistakes to avoid upsetting anyone and damaging their reputation in any case, I'm not at all convinced that the extra levels of perceived protection are worth the huge hidden costs they create in the payments ecosystem as a whole.
I suggest business implement a 2% cash discount (after raising prices 2%).
And the problem that would cause for the payment services is exactly why these days they often prohibit discriminatory pricing in their agreements with merchants.
In fact, you will rarely find a more one-sided set of legal agreements than those between the big financial services and the merchants. They get away with just about anything they want, because their customers are businesses so typically none of the normal consumer protection laws about contracts being fair and reasonable apply, and what are you going to do, not take the payment method all your customers expect you to accept?
Ultimately, you need them a lot more than they need you, unless you are literally operating on the scale of Amazon, Walmart, Tesco and the like. Your only viable "choice" is to play along and hope not to get accidentally squashed by the big players without them even noticing. Enjoy your no guarantee at all that the money you think you have won't be clawed back months later in response to an entirely false claim by a customer who forgot they paid you, and enjoy the fees the financial services will charge you for the privilege!
Sure, companies are selling data about you and sure, they know everything you purchase and where and when you purchase it.
Part of the problem with the debate is when people say things like that. Perhaps you don't realise it, but what you wrote there simply isn't true.
For example, I have businesses, and we receive payments from people via various banks or online services or whatever. None of those financial services has any information about what those people were paying us for, only the details of the payment itself.
In most cases, financial services we deal with wanted to know something about what line of business we were in before agreeing to work with us. That means there is some genuine risk if you're talking about people buying something from a vendor known for supplying potentially sensitive or controversial products or service.
However, there's no magic database that tells anyone, even the card companies, exactly what you buy. The most extensive analysis is probably done by the big stores with their loyalty card programmes, and they really are looking at everything you purchase and doing all kinds of predictions about what might incentivize you to spend more with them in the future. However, participation in those programmes is typically optional, and the benefits tend to be so small that most people wouldn't really lose out if they just said no when they were offered a chance to sign up.
Except that all other problems don't flow from there, for most normal people. Most normal people see a trusted brand (with a few high profile stories about standing up to government surveillance not doing any harm to that reputation) and buy and use the product they want from that brand. Most normal people aren't particularly interested in hypothetical bogeymen, and privacy absolutists tend to rely on hypothetical bogeyman as the foundation of their argument.
I guess it depends on where you are. There's been a lot of tension between governments and employers in the UK in recent years because of the amount it costs employers to defend hiring and firing decisions, which in some cases employees were able to challenge for negligible if any cost. Obviously that's a good thing in terms of protecting employees from genuine abuse, but it can also be hard for an employer to get rid of someone genuinely bad who decides to cause trouble.
I know the rules have changed relatively recently, so maybe this isn't the problem it used to be any more. Certainly not so long ago I knew of multiple employers who would privately admit to making sub-optimal hiring decisions entirely because they were afraid of the challenges from black/female/whatever applicants. Ironically, the most blatant example was hiring an equal opportunities rep, where several very qualified old white guys were overlooked in favour of the only black, female applicant, who was much younger and had far less relevant experience. Though perhaps in this particular case, that example doesn't help my argument...
Fortunately, it's not as simple as that. Try that attitude in a tribunal/court on someone who is older but perfectly well qualified for the job as advertised if you like, but bring your company cheque book.
If I am an HR department and fund that you don't have a social media account I may actually find it highly suspicious.
Great, you'll save me from making the mistake of working for your business.
Any chance you could also require applications in Word format, or better yet via some obscure and awkward online form that only your organisation uses, so I can also avoid wasting any time accidentally applying?
Licensing is one thing, but name me one enterprise-scale customer that is subject to Microsoft updating their systems in arbitrary ways without the enterprise's knowledge or consent, or to Microsoft discontinuing a product line so the enterprise had to stop using it at short notice. The rules are entirely different in that game to what the small businesses and independent professionals have to deal with.
Hey, don't knock the Mac Mini! Recent models have been below par, but for several years we used some of the older ones as lightweight Linux servers. They were cheap, were small, and drew little power, which significantly cut the server room or colo costs, and the specs were good enough for most purposes.
Alas, like a lot of Apple hardware and software, what they've produced under the same brand in recent years has been disappointing. These days for the same kinds of job, you'd probably buy one ludicrously high-spec system with hot-swap everything and virtualize all the individual servers instead.
Depending on pricing, I could see how Windows as a Service could make sense for businesses.
If they are big enough to have real influence on forward compatibility, maybe. Otherwise, there is a reason that businesses are typically very slow to upgrade to new versions of major software products they use: change is expensive and stability is important for getting real work done. Any sort of X-as-a-service offering that is subject to arbitrary changes, price rises, or even discontinuation is a business risk. Paying for long term support of your existing, tried and tested platforms (as with XP and presumably with 7 in due course) is often going to be a better strategy for businesses, no matter how much the software companies might hate it.
The recent ransomware attacks mostly affected Windows 7 machines that hadn't had a certain security patch applied even though it had been freely available for some time. Initially there was a thought that old XP machines with expired special support contracts might have been the main victims, but it turns out that it wasn't really about money to continue extending support, just plain old incompetence.
Those aren't necessarily the same thing at all. For a long time, your copy of software you bought with a permanent licence was yours. Various software companies tried to limit rights to it through EULAs, copyright tricks, and so on, but at least in some parts of the world the courts have pretty consistently undermined those moves.
So now there is a move in certain parts of the industry, particularly the parts selling expensive business software and selling games, to move away from any pretense of permanent sales and make it quite explicit that you're just renting something on a subscription basis. This is what has a lot of professional and power user types upset, because relying on something that can be changed or even permanently switched off at any time is not a reliable way to run anything, and is why a new generation of tech laws may now have to deal with questions of service longevity, data portability, and so on.
A more apt conclusion from your example would be that musicians only get to eat if someone else does the farming. Fortunately, we have the concept of currency, so people from different walks of life can contribute in different ways and recognise the value of each other's contributions.
What you can't have is a lot of musicians who all get to take the farmers' food for free. One musician might not cause a big loss if the farmer was going to have surplus crops anyway, but one thousand musicians all taking the farmer's food without paying might be enough that the farmer can't stay in business any more, and then everyone is going to go hungry.
It's nothing like a pyramid scheme and it has nothing to do with friends.
It is exactly like a pyramid scheme. This is how networking effects work. People who don't want to pay for content tend to attract more people who don't want to pay for content. High value customers tend to attract other high value customers. "Increasing your cachet" with the former group is not just unhelpful, it's actively harmful. And unless you actually are in a market that makes a lot of money from live performances -- which actually covers remarkably little of the creative industries -- your argument about increasing the number of people who want to come to your shows doesn't make sense anyway.
Stop pretending I made it up, that's ignorant at best, and more likely disingenuous fuckery.
Yeah, OK. Not really interested in debating with someone who resorts to cursing and name-calling. Sorry.
There's nothing definite about it. I've been involved with various experiments on this kind of thing in a professional capacity, and if you're thinking that locking down content only boosts conversions by a couple of percent or something, you are way off the mark.
Except most of us have first-hand knowledge that the RIAA/MPAA/BSA line of reasoning that a copy is the same as a lost sale is blatantly false.
Claiming that all copies are equivalent to the same number of lost sales is obviously false. Some people couldn't afford to buy in the first place.
But to be fair, claiming that none or only a few of those copies are equivalent to lost sales is similarly absurd. There are plenty of people who copy because they can get away with it but who could perfectly well have paid the asking price if they'd had to or could have saved up to buy a legit copy later.
Oh and about DRM on streaming, that stuff is still available on YouTube/torrents so if it works now I'd say it'd work tomorrow too without DRM because the DRM is actually not working very well.
This is one of the interesting parts of the debate, to me. Neither extreme position is realistic in terms of copies vs. lost sales, but how many sales do you actually lose without DRM, both directly through someone not paying you as much themselves, and indirectly if they then share what they've ripped further or even set up some sort of copycat site.
My suspicion is that for larger organisations, with mainstream content popular enough that finding a rip soon after release is easy for those who know how, all of the major costs can be modelled quite accurately as percentages of the overall budget for the work. DRM delays rips by X amount saving Y% of the revenues that would otherwise be lost because people buy before the crack is out. Piracy once the DRM is broken costs Z% of real sales that would otherwise be made. About R% of those losses can cost-effectively be recovered afterwards through enforcement action in court against major offenders, but it will cost L% for the legal costs. And so on.
For niche or high value works with smaller markets, I wonder whether the economics change, though. With any compound effect, it's much cheaper to act early, and so in a smaller market, it actually is conceivable that you can keep the situation contained to the point that someone can't just find a rip of your stuff easily. For high value works, it may also be worth spending real money to take real legal action against any known infringer and not just against major sources or copycats. Moreover, in smaller markets, the effects of doing these things may actually make a difference to commercial viability for the work as a whole.
Unfortunately, there's relatively little published data to go on here, since obviously most IP rightsholders keep their cards close to their chest.
It is readily available to the public via streaming, just not to you for reasons that are hardly the supplier's fault. Obviously the entire world does not revolve around the convenience of one specific customer, and I think it's unreasonable to expect suppliers to open themselves up to potentially significant losses just to avoid inconveniencing you. As you point out yourself, you do have other legal channels available to obtain the work.
I've never said you were advocating piracy anywhere, nor do I have this deep emotional connection to this issue that for some reason you keep mentioning. My point here remains a very simple one: copyright infringement is both morally and practically indistinguishable from some combination of theft and fraud.
My argument also remains very simple: if we assume everyone is equal and they all infringe in the same way, the ultimate result is that the creator has provided their work, yet has no compensation for it.
I see only two possible variations if the equality assumption is fair. One is that people take the work offered in return for payment, but don't actually intend to pay, which is fraud. The second is that the creator was effectively paid but then had the money was somehow taken back, which would be theft. The financial consequence is the same either way.
Otherwise, the original assumption of equality is unsound, and in fact some people receiving the work are given special treatment where they are not required to pay like everyone else. Of course, this is not in the spirit of either fairness or everyone being seen the same in the eyes of the law. In any case, it still inevitably means the creator is receiving less income than they should have and/or those who do pay for the work are paying more than they should need to in order to make up the difference. Someone is still losing out for the benefit of the person who gets the work but doesn't pay, compared to the situation where everyone obeys the law.
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Right, but that sort of problem is caused directly by the card industry's persistent failure to fix their systemic vulnerability. There is absolutely no reason in 2017 that anyone who can read a couple of details off a piece of plastic should be able to charge arbitrary amounts to someone's account without even having any sort of explicit authorisation from the account holder. The major card networks are the best placed organisations in the world to fix that problem, and in doing so to dramatically reduce financial crime, but since they mostly pass the buck when it comes to fraud liability onto the merchants anyway, they have limited incentives to invest in doing better.
Just about everyone goes through an intermediary rather than connecting directly with the card networks. That's how the system is set up.
Paying even 5% in card fees is extraordinary, though, unless you're an extremely high-risk customer (either due to the nature of your business or due to something like having a poor history of chargebacks that makes you look like a liability anyway).
May I ask where you are? Certainly with the business banking terms we typically see here in the UK, the fees heavily favour electronic transactions to the point that just putting cash into the bank or taking it out would be in the same range as typical card payment fees and the like. There are other accounts with lower fees for cash-based businesses, but they charge much higher fees for the electronic stuff.
It's true that we are far from an all-seeing eye kind of scenario - but it's also true that we are far from a cash-transaction, anonymous kind of scenario.
Agreed. I think it's important to be clear about where on the scale we're talking about, though, because there's definitely a problem with privacy issues, including those around payments, that campaigners overstate the risks in some cases and then the general public tunes out and ignores real risks elsewhere.
That's a real problem with almost any non-cash payment method, but it's different to the issue we were talking about before.
Actually, the costs of handling cash are typically significantly higher than the costs of processing electronic transactions, even for small businesses. We pay almost no fees for electronic transactions on our main bank accounts, but probably almost as much as the card fees would have been just to deposit the cash at the bank, for example, and that's before you even consider the costs of handling it and transporting physical money to and from a bank securely. There are good arguments for not going to an entirely cashless society, but for most businesses in most places this isn't going to be one of them.
It's always surprising how backward the US is when it comes to financial services and payment technology. For example, here in the UK, contactless payments for low value transactions have become ubiquitous within the past few years. You literally just tap your card on the machine and most of the time it just beeps to confirm the payment within a second or so and you're done. It's about the same with the alternatives that pay via your phone instead of an actual plastic card. Either way, it's faster and far less hassle than cash payments for all concerned. Even for transactions above the contactless limit, chip and PIN has been the standard here for a very long time, and again most of the time the transaction is confirmed within a couple of seconds. It's the same in much of Europe, and many other places in the world. For some reason, going by the comments I often see online, the US payments industry just seems to lag a decade or two behind the rest of the world. The technology itself can do much better.
Business just has to have the balls to raise their middle fingers to VISA. I've seen more than a few that are ATM and cash only.
That strategy doesn't hold up well with purchases increasingly taking place online rather than in bricks and mortar stores, though.
It's good that there are other options online -- PayPal being the 800lb gorilla, of course -- but often the same laws and regulations about consumer protections and fraud checks and so on wind up catching the alternative payment schemes anyway, and the same old problems rear their ugly heads again.
As someone who deals with these kinds of payments, the situation would be better for almost everyone if there weren't all these consumer protections (and therefore business risks) attached to non-cash payment methods, or even required by law in some cases.
You might think you're getting a good deal, but the reality is that they cause all kinds of problems with unreliable payments and false positives, which in turn waste absurd amounts of time for both businesses and customers, with the former obviously passing on their extra costs to the latter in higher prices.
Given that most businesses and most customers are basically honest about transactions, you often have legal safeguards in the cases where they aren't, and most businesses will want to put right any mistakes to avoid upsetting anyone and damaging their reputation in any case, I'm not at all convinced that the extra levels of perceived protection are worth the huge hidden costs they create in the payments ecosystem as a whole.
I suggest business implement a 2% cash discount (after raising prices 2%).
And the problem that would cause for the payment services is exactly why these days they often prohibit discriminatory pricing in their agreements with merchants.
In fact, you will rarely find a more one-sided set of legal agreements than those between the big financial services and the merchants. They get away with just about anything they want, because their customers are businesses so typically none of the normal consumer protection laws about contracts being fair and reasonable apply, and what are you going to do, not take the payment method all your customers expect you to accept?
Ultimately, you need them a lot more than they need you, unless you are literally operating on the scale of Amazon, Walmart, Tesco and the like. Your only viable "choice" is to play along and hope not to get accidentally squashed by the big players without them even noticing. Enjoy your no guarantee at all that the money you think you have won't be clawed back months later in response to an entirely false claim by a customer who forgot they paid you, and enjoy the fees the financial services will charge you for the privilege!
Sure, companies are selling data about you and sure, they know everything you purchase and where and when you purchase it.
Part of the problem with the debate is when people say things like that. Perhaps you don't realise it, but what you wrote there simply isn't true.
For example, I have businesses, and we receive payments from people via various banks or online services or whatever. None of those financial services has any information about what those people were paying us for, only the details of the payment itself.
In most cases, financial services we deal with wanted to know something about what line of business we were in before agreeing to work with us. That means there is some genuine risk if you're talking about people buying something from a vendor known for supplying potentially sensitive or controversial products or service.
However, there's no magic database that tells anyone, even the card companies, exactly what you buy. The most extensive analysis is probably done by the big stores with their loyalty card programmes, and they really are looking at everything you purchase and doing all kinds of predictions about what might incentivize you to spend more with them in the future. However, participation in those programmes is typically optional, and the benefits tend to be so small that most people wouldn't really lose out if they just said no when they were offered a chance to sign up.
Except that all other problems don't flow from there, for most normal people. Most normal people see a trusted brand (with a few high profile stories about standing up to government surveillance not doing any harm to that reputation) and buy and use the product they want from that brand. Most normal people aren't particularly interested in hypothetical bogeymen, and privacy absolutists tend to rely on hypothetical bogeyman as the foundation of their argument.
I guess it depends on where you are. There's been a lot of tension between governments and employers in the UK in recent years because of the amount it costs employers to defend hiring and firing decisions, which in some cases employees were able to challenge for negligible if any cost. Obviously that's a good thing in terms of protecting employees from genuine abuse, but it can also be hard for an employer to get rid of someone genuinely bad who decides to cause trouble.
I know the rules have changed relatively recently, so maybe this isn't the problem it used to be any more. Certainly not so long ago I knew of multiple employers who would privately admit to making sub-optimal hiring decisions entirely because they were afraid of the challenges from black/female/whatever applicants. Ironically, the most blatant example was hiring an equal opportunities rep, where several very qualified old white guys were overlooked in favour of the only black, female applicant, who was much younger and had far less relevant experience. Though perhaps in this particular case, that example doesn't help my argument...
Fortunately, it's not as simple as that. Try that attitude in a tribunal/court on someone who is older but perfectly well qualified for the job as advertised if you like, but bring your company cheque book.
If I am an HR department and fund that you don't have a social media account I may actually find it highly suspicious.
Great, you'll save me from making the mistake of working for your business.
Any chance you could also require applications in Word format, or better yet via some obscure and awkward online form that only your organisation uses, so I can also avoid wasting any time accidentally applying?
Licensing is one thing, but name me one enterprise-scale customer that is subject to Microsoft updating their systems in arbitrary ways without the enterprise's knowledge or consent, or to Microsoft discontinuing a product line so the enterprise had to stop using it at short notice. The rules are entirely different in that game to what the small businesses and independent professionals have to deal with.
Hey, don't knock the Mac Mini! Recent models have been below par, but for several years we used some of the older ones as lightweight Linux servers. They were cheap, were small, and drew little power, which significantly cut the server room or colo costs, and the specs were good enough for most purposes.
Alas, like a lot of Apple hardware and software, what they've produced under the same brand in recent years has been disappointing. These days for the same kinds of job, you'd probably buy one ludicrously high-spec system with hot-swap everything and virtualize all the individual servers instead.
Depending on pricing, I could see how Windows as a Service could make sense for businesses.
If they are big enough to have real influence on forward compatibility, maybe. Otherwise, there is a reason that businesses are typically very slow to upgrade to new versions of major software products they use: change is expensive and stability is important for getting real work done. Any sort of X-as-a-service offering that is subject to arbitrary changes, price rises, or even discontinuation is a business risk. Paying for long term support of your existing, tried and tested platforms (as with XP and presumably with 7 in due course) is often going to be a better strategy for businesses, no matter how much the software companies might hate it.
The recent ransomware attacks mostly affected Windows 7 machines that hadn't had a certain security patch applied even though it had been freely available for some time. Initially there was a thought that old XP machines with expired special support contracts might have been the main victims, but it turns out that it wasn't really about money to continue extending support, just plain old incompetence.
Software is typically licensed, not sold...
It's nominally on permanent loan to you.
Those aren't necessarily the same thing at all. For a long time, your copy of software you bought with a permanent licence was yours. Various software companies tried to limit rights to it through EULAs, copyright tricks, and so on, but at least in some parts of the world the courts have pretty consistently undermined those moves.
So now there is a move in certain parts of the industry, particularly the parts selling expensive business software and selling games, to move away from any pretense of permanent sales and make it quite explicit that you're just renting something on a subscription basis. This is what has a lot of professional and power user types upset, because relying on something that can be changed or even permanently switched off at any time is not a reliable way to run anything, and is why a new generation of tech laws may now have to deal with questions of service longevity, data portability, and so on.
A more apt conclusion from your example would be that musicians only get to eat if someone else does the farming. Fortunately, we have the concept of currency, so people from different walks of life can contribute in different ways and recognise the value of each other's contributions.
What you can't have is a lot of musicians who all get to take the farmers' food for free. One musician might not cause a big loss if the farmer was going to have surplus crops anyway, but one thousand musicians all taking the farmer's food without paying might be enough that the farmer can't stay in business any more, and then everyone is going to go hungry.
It's nothing like a pyramid scheme and it has nothing to do with friends.
It is exactly like a pyramid scheme. This is how networking effects work. People who don't want to pay for content tend to attract more people who don't want to pay for content. High value customers tend to attract other high value customers. "Increasing your cachet" with the former group is not just unhelpful, it's actively harmful. And unless you actually are in a market that makes a lot of money from live performances -- which actually covers remarkably little of the creative industries -- your argument about increasing the number of people who want to come to your shows doesn't make sense anyway.
Stop pretending I made it up, that's ignorant at best, and more likely disingenuous fuckery.
Yeah, OK. Not really interested in debating with someone who resorts to cursing and name-calling. Sorry.
There's nothing definite about it. I've been involved with various experiments on this kind of thing in a professional capacity, and if you're thinking that locking down content only boosts conversions by a couple of percent or something, you are way off the mark.
Except most of us have first-hand knowledge that the RIAA/MPAA/BSA line of reasoning that a copy is the same as a lost sale is blatantly false.
Claiming that all copies are equivalent to the same number of lost sales is obviously false. Some people couldn't afford to buy in the first place.
But to be fair, claiming that none or only a few of those copies are equivalent to lost sales is similarly absurd. There are plenty of people who copy because they can get away with it but who could perfectly well have paid the asking price if they'd had to or could have saved up to buy a legit copy later.
Oh and about DRM on streaming, that stuff is still available on YouTube/torrents so if it works now I'd say it'd work tomorrow too without DRM because the DRM is actually not working very well.
This is one of the interesting parts of the debate, to me. Neither extreme position is realistic in terms of copies vs. lost sales, but how many sales do you actually lose without DRM, both directly through someone not paying you as much themselves, and indirectly if they then share what they've ripped further or even set up some sort of copycat site.
My suspicion is that for larger organisations, with mainstream content popular enough that finding a rip soon after release is easy for those who know how, all of the major costs can be modelled quite accurately as percentages of the overall budget for the work. DRM delays rips by X amount saving Y% of the revenues that would otherwise be lost because people buy before the crack is out. Piracy once the DRM is broken costs Z% of real sales that would otherwise be made. About R% of those losses can cost-effectively be recovered afterwards through enforcement action in court against major offenders, but it will cost L% for the legal costs. And so on.
For niche or high value works with smaller markets, I wonder whether the economics change, though. With any compound effect, it's much cheaper to act early, and so in a smaller market, it actually is conceivable that you can keep the situation contained to the point that someone can't just find a rip of your stuff easily. For high value works, it may also be worth spending real money to take real legal action against any known infringer and not just against major sources or copycats. Moreover, in smaller markets, the effects of doing these things may actually make a difference to commercial viability for the work as a whole.
Unfortunately, there's relatively little published data to go on here, since obviously most IP rightsholders keep their cards close to their chest.
It is readily available to the public via streaming, just not to you for reasons that are hardly the supplier's fault. Obviously the entire world does not revolve around the convenience of one specific customer, and I think it's unreasonable to expect suppliers to open themselves up to potentially significant losses just to avoid inconveniencing you. As you point out yourself, you do have other legal channels available to obtain the work.
I've never said you were advocating piracy anywhere, nor do I have this deep emotional connection to this issue that for some reason you keep mentioning. My point here remains a very simple one: copyright infringement is both morally and practically indistinguishable from some combination of theft and fraud.
My argument also remains very simple: if we assume everyone is equal and they all infringe in the same way, the ultimate result is that the creator has provided their work, yet has no compensation for it.
I see only two possible variations if the equality assumption is fair. One is that people take the work offered in return for payment, but don't actually intend to pay, which is fraud. The second is that the creator was effectively paid but then had the money was somehow taken back, which would be theft. The financial consequence is the same either way.
Otherwise, the original assumption of equality is unsound, and in fact some people receiving the work are given special treatment where they are not required to pay like everyone else. Of course, this is not in the spirit of either fairness or everyone being seen the same in the eyes of the law. In any case, it still inevitably means the creator is receiving less income than they should have and/or those who do pay for the work are paying more than they should need to in order to make up the difference. Someone is still losing out for the benefit of the person who gets the work but doesn't pay, compared to the situation where everyone obeys the law.