Copyright infringement is a kind of theft. All theft is bad. Therefore copyright infringement is bad.
He talks about stealing songs and says, more or less, "Well, you can argue all you want, but downloading a song is stealing and stealing is wrong."
No, it's not stealing, it's copyright infringement. The two are distinct along legal, historical, and moral dimensions.
Sorry if I misinterpreted what you were saying, but it sounded like you were arguing that there's a moral force behind copyright and that it rests in its similarity to theft.
I'll update my article accordingly.
The words we choose are very important when discussing ideas, just ask the republicans who have used this technique for years to sway the public to their side on various social and political matters (death tx vs. estate tax being one example).
I agree with you about choosing words carefully, but either choice doesn't change the article. In context, the semantics were irrelevant.
Did people not intuit it before the 18th century? It took over 300 years from the invention of the printing press for modern copyright law to form.
Copyright (and patent) law exists and has always existed because it makes political and economic sense.
See Section I, Article 8 is the US Constitution, for example, where Congress gets its authority to establish copyright. Why do they have that authority? To promote the progress of science and useful arts.
Copyright law is a fundamentally different creature than the criminal law that governs theft and, IMO, this is just a reflection of their differing moral status in society.
Matt's argument, however implicit, was that copyright infringement is wrong because it's a kind of theft. It's not, nor has it ever been and therefore his argument is fallacious.
If that's a semantic argument then I guess I'll have to live with that.
In any case, here is the argument. Theft is wrong because it violates the individual right of the property owner.
Copyright exists to provide a temporary incentive for content creators to continue producing. It's not a natural right, it's a collective bargain between the public and content producers. "You get a 14 year monopoly to make some money, please continue writing songs."
That bargain was broken a long time ago (roughly Mickey Mouse invention date + 14 years).
Even if there was broad consensus that copyright infringement is 'intuitively wrong', intuition has a rather spotty track record for producing sensible normative ethical guidelines. Consider slavery, for example. It used to be so 'intuitive' that owning other humans as property was not morally problematic.
And face it, the Free Culture side of this debate uses that tactic a lot. "Copying isn't piracy! Pirates kill people! Abolish copyright!"