> spared me of the headache of dealing with pirated things
Without any sort of DRM and today's internet speeds, pirating digital media would probably be like Napster
Greenheart Games famously purposely released a different version of Game Dev Tycoon for pirating. You can read the blog post here: https://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when...
Most of the software I use depend on centralized functionality. Example: convenient online invitation, sharing of resources and integrations (for productivity), accomplishments, ladders and updates (for games).
For music media, there are a lot of people (67%) using streaming (random source: https://ifpi-website-cms.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/IFPI_GMR...) which is a totally different service than having a list of songs on your device then struggling with organizing/synchronizing/keeping up to date.
Media and software do not "work" like physical goods. Value should be extracted from them but a lot of earth population is poor and could still "use" the media/software (example: 57% of world population has less than 10$ income per day source: https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$model$markers$mountain$enc...)
Regional pricing based on Purchasing Power Parity could be a solution. However, perhaps too many customers would use VPNs and pretend to be from the poorest countries on Earth.
Some technical solutions could be implemented, but I wonder if it is worth it? My claim is that probably 80-90% of the people that can pay, already do, because they get things they want in return (as mentioned with the online services connected to various things). We shouldn't make it completely easy to copy software, but the focus of companies would be to develop new useful things not to restrict platforms to police poor people or the few that like to steal.
In the end, I suspect that the platform companies know that - as an example Google probably gave Android without asking a lot in return - but what they need are excuses to restrict competition when they reached a dominant position.
Rather than proposing technical solutions to fix this invented issue, I would rather find the next challenger - that will start by being nice (same as Google did).