Meh, that's a weak argument. The software industry wants to benefit from the fact that data can be copied for free (a unique property of our world), but also wants to put a sticker price on each ephemeral "copy" as of it's a material object.

In the world if matter, things have copies and we can count them. In the world of knowledge there's no such concept and it lives by different rules. RIAA and other luddites try to turn ideas into stones to sell them.

>The software industry wants to benefit from the fact that data can be copied for free (a unique property of our world), but also wants to put a sticker price on each ephemeral "copy" as of it's a material object.

so things that have low cost of materials / low cost of delivery, but high cost of skills required shouldn't be expensive? or what?

I don't understand how is this even relevant that software can be distributed very cheaply.

Creating software, or even better - the game requires significant investment and risk, so I don't understand how anyone would want to act as if that pirating was OK.

I was trying to say that the reason we have this paradox of "pirated bytes" that simultaneously causes losses and doesn't cause losses is that we try to impose rules of the material world onto the world of ideas.

I'd argue that software isn't built, but discovered and selling the same knowledge of how to sail the discovered island is a challenge, as we know. SaaS is essentially hiding that knowledge and selling bits of derived knowledge specific to each customer. SaaS doesn't attempt to sell the same knowledge twice. Otoh, the movies and music industry hasn't figured out this derived knowledge trick, so it struggles.

All of this has been (until quite recently) purely a social construct, though. In the days of buying CDs, you were buying bits etched onto a plastic circle and you had physical possession of those bits. On Steam, you're literally buying bits, because you pay and then you download bits onto your PC (in this case, hypothetically Steam could decide to revoke future access to those bits, but you'd still have local copies of them).

Imagine if someone told you "Oh, that physical book you bought, with the pages and the words in it? Yeah, actually what we sold you was a license to a book." It's nonsense. We only played along in the digital realm because it was the only way for commercial digital artifacts to exist given the greater ease of making perfect copies of digital artifacts compared to physical artifacts like books.

That said, XaaS is now making that social construct physically real. It's still hamstringing one of the best things about digital artifacts, but at least it's honest now.

IIRC, when you set up an Apple device you agree that you're basically leasing out the hardware or something like that, which is IMO a big wad of baloney.