By violating the copyright of the content you are stealing the creators money. I'm surprised the meme that copyright violation is "different" than stealing is still a meme. Yes, copyright violation is not "stealing", but the majority of the time the end result is "stealing" money from the content creators.
Who is stealing which money when I watch a video of a song on Youtube? Do you really think I would have bought all those songs if they were not available on Youtube?
If those songs weren't there for free, would you be just staring at a wall doing nothing?
You may not be stealing directly from the people whose works you are entertaining yourself with, but you are stealing from the people whose works you would have otherwise bought if you didn't have this free entertainment that you consider unworthy of your purchase yet still view anyway.
That's a flawed analogy. Eating tomatoes from your own garden would be akin to listening to music that you yourself composed and recorded.
If you enjoy content and declare "It isn't worth the price, and I wouldn't have bought it anyway, so what's the harm, right?" you are still satisfying your urge to be entertained. If, without this access to free, overpriced entertainment, you would have otherwise sought out and bought other entertainment that you deemed worthy of your money, you are stealing from the people offering worthy entertainment.
If someone owned a practically infinite supply of water from a spring and bottled water for $50 per 12 oz bottle, and you said, "Hey it's fine if I sneak on their land and drink from their spring, because I wouldn't pay for their water anyway, so who am I hurting, right?" regardless that there is tap water that you would have otherwise bought at $0.03 per gallon, but now have no need for.
You may not be hurting the spring owners, but you are hurting the utilities selling the tap water.
IMO, this is why entertainment mostly sucks nowadays. It's very hard to make any money in it, because people are all watching/listening to crap movies/music, turning their nose at it and refusing to pay, and then going in for a second helping. /rant
Do you really think that supply / demand only applies to tangible goods? Do you really think that there would be no financial impact on Microsoft if they removed all of their license / activation technologies and relied on honor code?
