I wasn't trying to justify piracy or suggest that people should be able to get things for free [1]. Rather that while piracy is an unfortunate reality of doing business selling digital goods, it probably doesn't have nearly as much impact on the bottom line as some might believe.

This is why companies like Valve practically ignore piracy altogether and instead focus on delivering as much value as possible to actual paying customers at prices they're willing to accept (focusing on exactly what you said smart businesses should). Contrast that to those companies that, blinded by the sheer number of people pirating their products, waste money and time in a futile effort to combat piracy by placing draconian DRM schemes on their products, that end up resulting in the pirated versions offering a superior user experience when all is said and done. A sweet irony if I ever saw one.

[1] I used to be a heavy pirate myself when I was in high school, but these days I regularly pay for content that's priced fairly and delivered in a way that's not user-hostile, and simply treat everything else as if it never existed in the first place.

capitalism wouldn't "crumble" if people who had no need for a product happened to have possession of it. If I had a free tugboat in my back yard, that does't alter the market for tugboat operators in any nearby port.

I thought that it has been economically proven that digital goods such as mp3 downloads have zero value, since each additional copy costs the manufacturer 0.

How are you defining value?

I think standard economic thought defines value in terms of preferences.

Such that the value that something has to me is the supremum of how much I value any of the things I would give up in order to have it.

So, if I am willing to purchase an mp3 for $1, then I value it at at least $1. If I would also be willing to purchase it for $2, then I value it at at least $2.

If I value it at $2, and it is for sale at $1, then I would gain $1 of value in that transaction.

If the seller is willing to sell it at any price over $0.50 , then that is how much they value (not) selling it.

So then, in this transaction I would gain $1 in value, and they would gain $0.50 in value.

I think this is the standard way to think about it.

Digital goods don't have zero value. We know this because people are willing to pay for them. They just have very little cost to reproduce/transport which results in easy sharing. They're not even unique in this regard - you'll find the same easy reproducibility in books, architectural plans, art, simple circuits, manufacturing techniques, algorithms... any idea that can be expressed and transmitted easily. The problem isn't that those things are worthless (they're not), it's that knowledge can't be "owned" like physical items.

>The problem isn't that those things are worthless

It's just that they're worth a lot more when corporations lobby governments to make copying them illegal.

That doesn't make the "economically proven to have 0 value" claim true I don't think.

> since each additional copy costs the manufacturer 0

How about the first copy? That cost "0" too?

If not, are you suggesting the first buyer pay full price and everyone else get it for free?

No, but every additional copy is cheaper than the first, and asymptotically approaches 0.