You haven’t explicitly claimed one. If you have a motive besides wanting to see the thing without feeling like you stole something, I'd like to hear it.

> It's the pretension that you're doing something other than that, for motives other than pure self-interest, which really bothers me.

Yes, it's very hard for me to see your motives as being something other than pure self-interest.

Am I wrong?

Isn't that the whole point of the free market? Make the total cost/effort for something lower than the alternative, and people will pay for it. I paid for Netflix for ages when they had every show/movie that I wanted to watch, instead of stuff being fragmented across 20 services.

Sure, that's the point of the free market. But anywhere else in the free market, we don't say "I don't want to pay for this/deal with the inconvenience, so I'll just take it for free".

The only way people try to make this work logically is to talk about how a digital good has a nominal real cost - but that's a very different argument.

> to talk about how a digital good has a nominal real cost

So once again, they can't lose imaginary income.

Are physical goods priced solely to cover nominal real costs?

If they are, then you have an argument. If they aren't, then whatever that price is covering other than nominal real costs is being stolen in this case as well.

Is the question "what is a free market"?