Look at the big picture of the system, not at single transactions. With payment after the fact, artists can optionally use their gut feeling about demand and produce something that they think may sell without having any reputation beforehand. I think that this is essential to entrepreneurship and would hate to see it lost.
Many arguments about piracy don't make sense until you look at the big picture. To someone actively selling software, even the "stolen car" analogy makes sense. If everybody steals cars, you go out of business. If everybody steals software, you go out of business. That in the latter case you "lose $0" doesn't help you pay your bills.
Wow. If everyone could copy whatever car they wanted for free, that would be a good thing. Since everyone would already have a car, car salesmen would go out of business. That's exactly what should happen.
If you physically stole cars but left the complete per-unit cost in cash there, then you wouldn't have done anything wrong, right? Alternatively, you have a machine that makes perfect copies. Both work the same for this purpose.
Because you only focus on the per-unit cost. But even cars have fixed, one-time R&D costs that are distributed on each sold car totally arbitrarily just as the fixed costs for producing digital goods area distributed totally arbitrarily on each download/CD/whatever. The only difference is that digital goods have virtually no per unit-costs to go along with it. Still, in both cases, you need frameworks to reward creative/R&D work if you want it to happen (especially in a competitive way).
If you copy all music and all cars, then everybody has a car and music, but what is the incentive to produce better cars and new music later? That is the big picture.
Yes. Cars do have fixed one-time R&D costs. If you can freely copy all cars, the incentive to design/produce a better car would then have to be something other than money. As an example, Greenpeace might want to cut vehicle emissions in half, so they'd research and develop a way to do it.
Many arguments about piracy don't make sense until you look at the big picture. To someone actively selling software, even the "stolen car" analogy makes sense. If everybody steals cars, you go out of business. If everybody steals software, you go out of business. That in the latter case you "lose $0" doesn't help you pay your bills.