quandrangle didn't say don't pay anyone. They said just because something is good, doesn't mean we have to pay every time we consume it. There are other conceivable ways of funding these things. Like crowd-funding, micropayments, whatever. If everyone followed quadrangle's logic, people who wanted to produce movies would find another way to fund them.
Please explain how crowd-funding a movie even makes sense? There are plenty of movies with actors I love that are terrible. Have you seen RED (or worse, RED 2)? For the same reason your boss doesn't pay you for the month you haven't worked yet, you shouldn't expect people to produce movies without any reliable way of getting paid.
And you're talking about a very new funding model. I'm not saying there are necessarily lots of examples of great movies already produced with this model. I'm saying they could easily be. A good number of projects have raised millions on kickstarter [1], including two movies [2, 3].
There's no reason the movie industry couldn't move to a pre-funding model. Or some other model nobody has thought of yet.
Their model already exists and they have moved to it - movie theaters and netflix. The movie industry is nice an healthy, they make more money each year then the previous. The reason they fight against piracy is simple - they want more money. If there's a chance to get more money, why not try? In reality, piracy is negligible and is not worth the policing effort. More importantly, eliminating piracy altogether will not convert all pirates to movie goers. That's absurd! A pirate is a person who will either steal a movie or not watch it. Either way they are not paying for it. Only a small percentage of pirates will switch to paying customers in a perfect scenario. So in reality, the industry will enjoy a negligible profit increase - that's all. Considering their current ever increasing profits from year to year, the industry is booming. They only reason they are chasing after pirates is because they are driven by they greed and incorrect perception of 'opportunity cost'. They see a huge chunk of potential pie because they imagine that once they are able to police movie watching completely, then every pirate will be paying them royalties. This is of course far from the truth. Greedy and dimwitted they persist to believe that illusion. I wonder what positive effects move piracy has on the industry that the industry is benefiting from but are not aware of? Perhaps free word of mouth advertising on an enormous scale? I think more people pirate movies than pay which means that a immense audience is functioning as free word of mouth advertisers. What impact would eliminating this group have on the industry? Worth to think about.
But there are lots of crowdfunding successes for videogames, even though they present the same problem that you don't know in advance how good it will be. So I don't think the situation is hopeless.
Another idea which I think has promise is payment by social conventions. Tipping culture in the US is like this: you are not legally required to pay waitstaff, but everyone does because they would be considered assholes if they didn't. People joke that it's ridiculous that rock bands and web cartoonists make most of their money selling t-shirts, but actually if we are aiming for social pressure t-shirts are the ideal currency---everyone you interact with in your daily life can see that you bought one. So if we got a convention going that "if you regularly read a webcomic you oughta buy the t-shirt", then it would be easy to ostracize the people who violate it.
