"If you can’t watch something legally until it comes out on Netflix or whatever service you use, you have only two justifiable options: either wait, or don’t watch it."
Or, alternatively, if you're going to anyway what's the problem again?
Mass media is meant to be a convenient, efficient market. When it isn't the moral failing is not on the part of consumers.
And the market is convenient, and efficient. It's just that the most convenient and efficient market for much of Television/mass media happens to be the black market. Until the legal market is as convenient, the problem won't go away. And it is possible to beat a casual pirate this way. I haven't pirated a music track in probably a decade thanks to iTunes and Amazon/Google's music stores.
Only if you don't care about Audio Quality. If you do the only way to get music legit is to buy a CD, copying the files and tagging them yourself. Except for classical and some other niche genres that have sites selling sizable catalogs of lossless.
Are you actually consuming anything? The act of consumption implies a physical loss; if the content still exists, what did you consume?
In the examples of diamonds, Ferrari or a beach house, there is a limitation on possession. With content, no such limitation exists; it used to be simply a limitation on distribution. Now the distribution limits are gone.
But I do have access to it. It's right there on all those torrent sites.
And morality is subjective. If enough people think that whether or not the creators are selling a TV show on itunes makes a difference to the morality of downloading it from other sources, then it does.
Content is an entirely different "market" economically than the other examples you describe. In fact, content is one of a few class of goods with a high fixed cost for initial creation and near zero cost for incremental creation.
Physical goods are generally characterized by linear supply and demand curves. Suppliers require higher and higher payments to produce more and more of a good, and consumers will buy less if something costs more. Here's a graph with classic linear supply-demand curves:
Note the intersection point: this is the equilibrium in microeconomics. It is a "compromise" reached by producers satisfied with their level of output, and consumers satisfied with their level of consumption.
Content turns conventional microeconomics on its head. Now, suppliers have a large fixed cost that they can divide among all paying users. So the supply-demand curves look like this:
This situation is entirely different! For starters, there isn't one equilibrium, there's two. Which "equilibrium" will the market choose? This is a question that I haven't seen addressed in microecon before. I'm sure it's been addressed in economic research but unfortunately my exposure to economics is limited. I would appreciate if someone on HN with more knowledge could set me straight.
Taking a step back to philosophical economics, content creation is a manifestation of the public good (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good) problem. This reality has only been enhanced recently with vanishing incremental copy costs. Entitlement of content creators has satisfyingly solved the problem before, but with the rapid advance of technology I doubt it will do so in the future.
Or, alternatively, if you're going to anyway what's the problem again?
Mass media is meant to be a convenient, efficient market. When it isn't the moral failing is not on the part of consumers.