There will always be piracy, but I think you'd be surprised at how many people are willing to pay as long as it's an easy process.
Piracy of intellectual property as a concept has only existed for a short period of time, less than a couple of hundred years. Are you totally sure the concept will remain legitimate in future?
I can't be sure of anything Carlton. As you know. But regardless, a lot of people earn money from selling digital products right now, which is my point, I'm one of those people too and have been for a few years now.
Will there be a drive to the bottom? There is, that's true. Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, but they are also receiving push back from artists. It's not the consumers who are unwilling to pay a decent price, it's the corps that are trying to undercut each other for a better bottom line.
Ok, so you sell digital products, you have a dog in this fight. That's good.
What do you think might happen if people followed the logic I am presenting? New digital goods producers/artists would not be able charge anything, no-one will buy/fund a product blindly. But once they are established, what do you think they could get as a single "release fund/bounty" for each product they produce? Could it be a similar total figure to what they might achieve selling it as individual copies, or perhaps more?
I say all this because I believe it fits reality best. Artists funding their work like that
cannot have their hard work undermined, because it's impossible to reproduce something that no-one else has a copy of.
It's somewhat reminiscent of this ridiculous "right to be forgotten" stuff. It's next to impossible to force information to be forgotten or destroyed, especially if the information is valuable. This follows a fundamental aspect of information theory: information wants to be free. Because it is free, intrinsically.