1. Taking food off someone's table was a metaphor.

2. If you're making the argument that theft is limited to tangible things, well, you're entitled to that belief, but generally the consensus is that intangible property is still property. Money is property.

3. If you're making the argument that zero marginal cost items are not private property, that's an extremely radical position that I doubt you actually endorse after thinking about the incentives in a society where that was the dominant view.

The most legitimate argument for large scale copyright theft is eminent domain style seizure on the grounds that it benefits society. I would even endorse a weak version of that argument in narrow, well defined instances. And do. Copyright should expire, and it should definitely be harder to extend. And it should be possible to seize copyright from estates where the creator is no longer living, in certain circumstances, or at least expand fair usage in some graded manner.

That's not what's being argued about though, what people in this thread, and what people who steal music and software used to believe was that those products weren't really property and so they could take them. It's flimsy justification for bad behavior.

> If you're making the argument that theft is limited to tangible things, well, you're entitled to that belief, but generally the consensus is that intangible property is still property. Money is property.

The argument is not about tangibility. If you steal someone's virtual money, they still cease to have it.

> If you're making the argument that zero marginal cost items are not private property, that's an extremely radical position

On the contrary, I'd argue that allowing people to literally own numbers is absurd.

Ah, then you’re a moron or a child.

Baseless insults are a great way to indicate that you don't have an argument.

I stand by my statement.

Your entire argument boils down to the idea that musicians shouldn't own distribution rights to their work and that sass software licenses should be free. It's a stupid position to hold that falls apart immediately.

So yes, either you're under thirty and haven't thought it through or your ability to reason about this stuff is limited.

> Your entire argument boils down to the idea that musicians shouldn't own distribution rights to their work and that sass software licenses should be free.

Not really. It's about copying not being the same, in benefits and drawbacks, as stealing. If you want to engage in good faith debate, you should acknowledge the difference.

Copying datas/ideas is easy, beneficial to many and not at all clear to always be harmful to society.

I'm being pretty good faith about this, I just don't appreciate people who can't read.

The theoretical benefits to society from distributing people's IP for free is that people who otherwise couldn't afford the money for a book or song or piece of software are able to use it.

Of course, it becomes impossible to support yourself as an indie producer of (software/music/literature/etc) in a world where your work can be taken for free. That reduces the number of people who can participate in the creation of that sort of thing to hobbyists and large businesses that are capable of protecting their IP through other avenues.

Getting rid of intellectual property rights is a short sighted exercise and all you end up doing once you've run through the trove of contemporary and historical IP is impoverishing the world to a much greater degree by destroying incentives for creators to create new things.

The only solutions that I've heard defenders come up with is some version of <hand waving> "it doesn't matter, people will still produce art" Yeah, people will produce, but like 1/10th what they could if they can't make a living off it or aren't trust funders.

Current copyright is life of the author + 70, which is too long. Still, even in that situation, those who wouldn't otherwise have access to those books will eventually get it for free as works enter public domain. If you want to argue that we should drastically reduce the length of copyright, I'd agree with you. But pretending that IP theft doesn't matter is naive.

> Yeah, people will produce, but like 1/10th what they could if they can't make a living off it or aren't trust funders.

Not a big loss. There's enough art in the world. And things that are not made for money tend to be better quality.

You've proven my point for me, thanks.

In your line of argumentation, if we enforced the ban on copying books, songs, movies perfectly, we would get much more of them.

Is this what we want though?

We are flooded with bad quality books, songs, movies, and it is hard to find something worth the time of a consumer who expects quality.

This flood of rubbish is apparently immensely profitable, even while all the copying is going on.

Why would high penalties for copying increase the average quality of production? There would be even more money in the business, attracting even more rubbish production.

If it's not possible to make a living at a vocation, all you will get is amateur participants. Even the most talented will have to find other things to do with their time in order to support themselves.

Contrary to the above sibling comment, amateurs do not often produce better art than professionals—promising amateurs learn their craft as professionals and tend to produce their best work mid-career. This conflicts with the lay understanding of creative endeavors, of course.

> If it's not possible to make a living at a vocation, all you will get is amateur participants.

Any examples? Do you believe the widespread availability of stuff on the internet makes it not possible to make a living writing software, books, TV show scripts or creating music?

> But pretending that IP theft doesn't matter is naive

I agree with you in the sense that distributing stuff on the Internet for free may cause lower revenue of the author than there would be without that. But the author and distributor should be aware of the Internet and its tendency to copy what is of interest and execute marketing/selling strategy to make it work anyway. Many do.

This is the "it's easy to steal so it's okay" argument, which I addressed up thread in a sibling comment about the dynamics of IP on the internet.

Yes, the conditions are as they are. Literature by dint of being pure text is probably in deep shit, but that's not what we're talking about—we're talking about whether the wide scale tragedy of the commons that is zero-friction IP theft is on balance, a bad thing.

No, it's the "internet is the platform for sharing" argument. Copying, sharing work of others is not, in essence, stealing that work. It is sharing that work, maybe illegaly, but then it is illegal sharing, not stealing.

1. I took it as a comparison

2. No, that’s not the argument I’m making. If someone steals the money on your bank account, you still lose a quantifiable amount of that money. Your private property is being taken. If someone infringes on your copyright, they have infringed on your right to exclusivity to the content, but they have not stolen any of your property.

Note that here, I’m not making a judgment of value. Copyright infringement is a crime under the law of most countries, and it is definitely bad in some systems of values.

But it’s just not stealing. Something can be a crime without being thievery.

As a comparison (not metaphor), say somebody organizes a barbecue in your lawn while you’re absent, without your authorization. They bring their own stuff, they don’t damage anything, and when you come back you don’t even realize they were here.

Did they commit a crime? Yes, they infringed on your property

Did you lose money? Maybe. It may be so that they would have paid you money to use your lawn if they had no choice. Or maybe they wouldn’t have had that barbecue at all.

Did they steal something of yours? No. Their crime is trespassing, not thievery.

3. That’s closer, but distorted. First, I never argued that copyright should be abolished. You are arguing on a weaker version of something I did not even mention. The only thing I was commenting on was that your argument for it was based on calling ip violation thievery, which it is not. Most modern systems of values consider thievery wrong, thus you create an emotional response to copyright by likening the two. But that is not a correct argument because copyright infringement is not thievery.

> and what people who steal music and software used to believe was that those products weren't really property and so they could take them. It's flimsy justification for bad behavior.

Those products didn’t exist before they made illicit copies themselves. If I make a fake Louis Vuitton bag for myself and wear it, I did not steal it. I certainly infringed on the designer’s IP, but my crime is counterfeiting, not thievery.

> that's an extremely radical position that I doubt you actually endorse after thinking about the incentives in a society where that was the dominant view.

Now that’s the interesting part. Now that we have admitted that copyright infringement is not thievery, ie not innately morally wrong in at least some systems of values (and I’m pretty sure it is actually a very recent notion), we can ask ourselves the right question: does it have a positive impact on society? The answer to that is mixed:

- It creates incentives for artists and people who transmit knowledge

- But it also creates inequality in access to culture / knowledge

- And it creates counter-incentives for people to access culture and knowledge. Thus making individuals less learned and knowledgable

No doubt that the first effect largely compensates the 3rd, and that globally it has a good effect on society. Remains that it is not optimal at all.

But can we create a better system of incentives? That’s the real question. My take on that is "probably.".

And which of these definitions includes copying?