Well, here's how it looks from each of the stakeholder's perspective, as near as I can tell:
Artists: You invest a ton of hard work into making something you're proud of. Then you make $0.87 because everyone is pirating it (or at least, that's what your distributor tells you).
Distributors: Their primary value these days is in marketing. So far it's just the web cartoonists who seem to be making a living off their work, but the distributors being supplanted over time. They're hiring lobbyists and trying to keep their leverage by fighting stuff like Net Neutrality.
Users: I bought a game the other week. It wouldn't install and gave me some vague nonsense error message like "Install failed: try again." My best guess is that Starforce DRM was the reason. I'm out $20. I'm guessing it twigged on some remnant of a CD drive emulator I used to convert some ISO a long time ago and later uninstalled, but it won't tell me. I never got to play it. I could get a crack for it, but all the crap I took from trying to make it work made me hate the game. Long story short, I returned it. The non-techie store clerk elected to mark it as "defective." I didn't really feel like contradicting her.
Pirates: You can get anything you want for free. Unlike the users, your version won't have DRM. Worries about viruses and such are real, but overrated for people who are reasonably computer savvy. There's a reason more people transition from user to pirate.
Librarians: They're sitting on some wax cylinders from 1890 that won't go out of copyright until 2067 thanks to a 1972 law that simplified (and extended) audio copyrights. The Library of Congress report said that they generally have to ignore the law to preserve a lot of historic audio files.
Artists: You invest a ton of hard work into making something you're proud of. Then you make $0.87 because everyone is pirating it (or at least, that's what your distributor tells you).
Distributors: Their primary value these days is in marketing. So far it's just the web cartoonists who seem to be making a living off their work, but the distributors being supplanted over time. They're hiring lobbyists and trying to keep their leverage by fighting stuff like Net Neutrality.
Users: I bought a game the other week. It wouldn't install and gave me some vague nonsense error message like "Install failed: try again." My best guess is that Starforce DRM was the reason. I'm out $20. I'm guessing it twigged on some remnant of a CD drive emulator I used to convert some ISO a long time ago and later uninstalled, but it won't tell me. I never got to play it. I could get a crack for it, but all the crap I took from trying to make it work made me hate the game. Long story short, I returned it. The non-techie store clerk elected to mark it as "defective." I didn't really feel like contradicting her.
Pirates: You can get anything you want for free. Unlike the users, your version won't have DRM. Worries about viruses and such are real, but overrated for people who are reasonably computer savvy. There's a reason more people transition from user to pirate.
Librarians: They're sitting on some wax cylinders from 1890 that won't go out of copyright until 2067 thanks to a 1972 law that simplified (and extended) audio copyrights. The Library of Congress report said that they generally have to ignore the law to preserve a lot of historic audio files.
Did I miss anyone?