I'm still surprised bands, authors etc don't have some sort of "honesty box" where people can make payments directly to them to thank them, compensate for piracy etc. Would cost nothing but benefit them if only a little in most cases. Perhaps their labels etc wouldn't like it if people routinely downloaded their stuff and paid them directly though.
I wonder if that could have unintended consequences. Would people feel better about pirating if such a thing existed?
It reminds me of the study in Freakonomics about day care centers and the problem of parents sometimes not picking up their kids on time. Which meant that employees would have to stay after closing. So they started charging parents a small fee for being late. The result was that parents were more late than ever, since it meant they no longer felt guilty. The fine removed the guilt associated with being late.
"Would people feel better about pirating if such a thing existed?"
You like an artist, you're honest and not poor. You can buy a cd for x, where some tiny percentage of x goes to the artists. Or you could download the cd and pay x to the artist.
the companies take a fee out of the "store" for every payment. This in turn means the payment has to be large enough to cover the fee and still allow profit.
The sum of said payment is likely to end up being above most people's "no worries" threshold. Never mind that now the card info is in yet another potentially hackable database.
