The fundamental issue at hand here is that it may be your opinion that piracy isn't piracy, that commercial software and digital copies are inherently worthless, but it's nothing more than just that: your opinion. Having an opinion doesn't entitle you to anything.
The laws are there, and there's more than one reason to have them.
Our current economical system is based on money. Sad, but true. People need money to survive. Worse yet, people need money to live. It's not a basic requirement, it's not a detail, it's the basis of western civilisation.
A bridge is indeed a a construction which "provide a desirable function that reduces time or effort in crossing a natural obstacle", but it can also be seen as a work of art, some bridges are mind boggling, masterpieces. And guess what? You have to pay a toll for a lot of bridges in order to cross them; especially when the convenience factor (also called luxury) is its main advantage.
However, I feel we're drifting very far away from the initial subject (and on a sidenote, man, dude, you have waaaayyy too much time on your hands to be guarding a thread this much). I would have liked to see this thread move in a positive manner, but as usual it's the same story, one guy versus the rest of the world, recycling the same arguments over and over, and bringing really, nothing, utterly nothing new to the table.
The point I wanted to bring across in my first few paragraphs was that people need money to live, but not everyone can be doing the same thing. Some people get next to nothing to be working in a factory day in, day out. Some people get paid massive amounts of money to wiggle their *** and pretend to be singing in front of a massive audience. And guess what? The latter are there *because* of the former. Not thanks to, because of. This is something that is very, very important to grasp. Celebrities are celebrities because people pay attention to them. If they didn't, they'd just be another person on Earth. Whether you feel uncomfortable about that is not the issue, and you shouldn't deflect on piracy and copyright because you feel there is an issue with society (because that's what this is starting to sound like).
I did quite like the turn when mmurfin87 started to think in terms of functional value rather than exact value. If you look at the exact value of a painting, its pure worth in terms of materials, sure, it's not much. But value is made of so much more than the basic building blocks -- this is the foundation of our whole world; I just can't fathom you don't realise this.
The building blocks that compose an application is code, or lines of code to be precise. A line of code, on its own, is usually quite useless, however if you have a few hundred thousands lines of code, and have a few architects that make it efficient, and designers who make it appealing to the eye, you suddenly obtain something which has a huge amount of value. How it is stored doesn't matter. How much the developers get paid doesn't really matter either. It's the whole package which holds the value, and it is only that package you pay for.
I'd also like to point out that you are oversimplifying things, and not setting up a disclaimer for it. Some applications cost $1, others cost a few thousand. I am a consultant for an application for which the contracts rarely have less than a million written on them. Is each developer entitled to a straight cut of that? Of course not. Because developers are far from the only ones that help build an application. And not a single person in all of those I have listed will ever touch a line of code; but they still need to be paid. For most companies, the Engineering team will represent tops 1/3 of the headcount. [...] Selling a product over and over keeps a company in business. The price point at which they sell the product is usually way below anything that it has actually cost to produce. A product like Photoshop or Lightroom requires investments in the order of millions. Yet you can buy it for a fraction of that. How come? Because they sell it multiple times.
Well, obviously, at some point they make a profit, and in some cases they even make a massive profit, but so what? Where's the problem with that? What alternatives would we have?
Everyone paying a fair share of what the product actually cost to produce, plus a little rounding up so everyone feels ok? Yeah, why not. But the product would never sell.
If you told people: "If everyone buys this product, right now, at this very instant, it will cost you $1. If you don't, this company and the 300 workers are without a job.". Nobody would buy.