Sorry, I wasn't clear in my cynicism. Movies, music, comics, TV, apps, games, books, and whatever else can be digitized are downloaded illegally. It's the culture. As such, the impact to creators, musicians, writers is not the issue I'm concerned with (Although I understand that the creators in question would see that differently). There are several very deep factors to be considered, in my mind, before I can even get to the considerations of creators. The overall impact that downloading has on our culture has me very concerned first and foremost.
For what it's worth, I don't think there's a moral issue, if that's the direction you're taking. I think it's a reaction to how companies treat their customers, rather than how the potential customers view buying things.
What I mean is that the top advantage to piracy isn't that it's free. For most people I've talked to, convenience hits the top of the list--you don't need special software or a trackable account with another password to remember. Next seems to be DRM and ownership, so a comic (for example) can be read on any device whenever you want, even if the company goes out of business.
It's a shame, but the pirates treat you far better than legitimate vendors. It reminds me of computers in the '80s, where you could play the game that made you refer to the manual every ten minutes to type in a key phrase, or you could get the cracked copy that made your life easier. Free is just a bonus, after that.
Past that point, there's sampling, in that you
might buy the comic (or album or whatever), but digital and legally means buying sight unseen, unlike a storefront where you can page through, whereas you can pirate it and figure out if it's worth paying. The value proposition seems to come after that, then price itself.
There are exceptions to that, of course, but anecdotally, I don't see a huge, persistent problem. OK, actually, I do, but I'll talk about that in a minute.
Everyone here seems to have a slightly different spin on what the main problem is with comics. Is it the industry? The medium? The creators? It frustrates me to see an artform like comics suffer and wither. But that's yet another topic.
It's all of them, probably.
And worse, I see it in a lot of industries, not just comics. When you look at electric cars, they tell you that it's not too expensive and you shouldn't be taking long trips. When you buy a computer, they tell you about "the post-PC era," so they can charge you double for a tablet and sign you up for a cloud subscription.
I suspect it's going to get worse as our household tools get better. When DC's biggest competitor is not so much Marvel as it is some kid with a cool story idea, how are they going to manage?
Look at what that's done to software, after all. I've been seeing a lot of people abandon Microsoft Office for LibreOffice (or OpenOffice), and a shockingly high (smaller) number--including myself, which I never thought would happen--moving to Linux. Stuff that people, rather than companies, made. It could be that really good comics are only an "inciting incident" away--something that makes it easy for people to get their story ideas out, and possibly a framework that allows others to improve it after it's been released.
