Amelie, I won't have time until later today to address most of your points -
much of which I agree with in principle, mind, but I do want to address one of them here and now, because it relies on a totally faulty premise.
Leaving aside the rest for now, your argument is not valid, because one of your fundamental premises you base it on is invalid.
The fatal flaw consists of how you have defined 'people.' Twice, (and therefore we must assume it's not a typo or other error) you equate 'people' with 'society.' False. Not the same thing
at all. What you are ignoring is
number.
By way of an illustrative counterexample, let me ask this: you've seen a lot of gay bars; most of us have, right?
So tell me, do the local TV stations have 24-hour cameras set up across the street, televising the comings and goings to hundreds of thousands or millions of people, i.e. 'society'? Are there bleachers set up in front of any gay bars you're aware of, filled with people sitting, watching who goes in and out? Of course not. Those ideas, of course, are ludicrous.
But they illustrate the gaping hole in your argument. Almost
no one at all sees
anyone at all enter or leave a gay bar!
And, of the
tiny, utterly insignificant number of people (
who are in relation to 'society' what a grain of sand is in relation to Waikiki Beach...) who
do happen to see a CD coming or going from such a place - why, most of
them are gay!
So, the net content of your argument is this: A
teeny-tiny handful of (usually gay) people who
happen to be in eyeshot, at that
exact, uncommon moment that a CD
happens to be entering or leaving a gay bar - what you've said is that
those couple of people somehow determine the attitude of all of Western society toward CDs!
As we logicians say, I don't
think so...