Finish the thought. How do they profit from someone else's creative work? Is it a) by just taking it because they can? or b) by mutual agreement with the original creator?
By being in a dominant economic position whereby they can force predatory terms onto content creators who cannot avoid them if they want any chance of getting anything at all, or reaching a significant audience.
You're trying to use emotional language to avoid actually thinking about the question. The correct answer is b, and the alternative is just plain banditry.
You don't have an automatic right to compensation or audience for your work. Your right is that others can't take your work without your permission--i.e. that they don't own your text just because they can read it. If you have no rights over your text, then only the man with the printing press wins. When you do have those rights, you can trade them for compensation, audience, etc. and that's your choice, not theirs.
Does this mean that agreements are made between entities in unequal economic positions? Yes. But so does employment, so does freelancing, so does nearly every business ever.
Being personally dissatisfied with the current economics of publishing does not change the social contract that underlies it.
> But so does employment, so does freelancing, so does nearly every business ever.
Sure, capitalism is fucked up all the way through.
If and when you get it to the point where people can negotiate from position of equal power (also in all those other areas, yes), then I could take your ethical point seriously.
As it is, the companies that get harmed by piracy of the kind that DRM prevents are parasites on society, and the notion that the deal that they force on the rest of us though their position of economic dominance is some kind of "social contract" is laughable. Which is exactly why piracy is so prevalent - if it really were a social contract, people wouldn't do it in droves.
