[anigbrowl]

Which is preceisly why publishers seek to impose deterrent penalties for copyright infringers, so as to increase the perceived risk.

some mythical starving artist grubbing away at the bottom of the Hollywood food chain

There are quite a lot of people, including myself, who make their living around the bottom of the Hollywood food chain. Attitudes like yours have made it incresingly difficult to launch small-budget projects of the sort that were designed to go direct to video, because ubiquitous low-cost piracy means that high-budget movies tend to crowd out low budget ones. Many world class directors, eg Martin Scorsese and James Cameron, got their start by doing low-budget exploitation pics that could be produced cheaply and sold cheaply. That market has been shrinking almost to nothing because piracy undermines not just cost structures but release windows, so in many ways it has become more difficult to bootstrap a film career than it used to be. Technology has made the process of shooting and editing a film a lot cheaper, but not across the board. Many economic inputs (like the cost of hiring locations or of feeding the cast and crew during production) cost as much or more as they always have, but it's a lot harder to raise a budget if you can't identify a predictable revenue stream.