What others said plus diamonds are only valuable because they're absurdly expensive. The scam works like this:

- What is valuable as a symbol of love is something completely useless, but which requires you to burn excessive amounts of resources (money). This is because the act of figuratively setting your money on fire clearly signals that you're making a sacrifice (and the amount of money you thus burn also doubles as a proxy for your wealth).

- The scam was established by what's now over a century of ongoing marketing efforts to convince generations of people to consider diamonds as a symbol of love, thus to be priced per rules described above.

- The scam is maintained by finding ways to create artificial scarcity. For instance, lab-made diamonds are very cheap and made to much higher quality than naturally-found ones, but "naturally found" is a perfect discriminator to force scarcity around. Hence it's the mined ones that are used for jewelry.

Textbooks, or videogames, are products of utility, and don't have the aforementioned dynamics. The only thing that's happening is point 3: publishers trying to find a way to make artificial scarcity work, without a benefit of having a good discriminator (all bits are created equal) - hence DRM.

Of course none of that justifies robbery, but in all cases it does justify every effort to prevent artificial scarcity from being established and maintained.

> Of course none of that justifies robbery, but in all cases it does justify every effort to prevent artificial scarcity from being established and maintained.

But why is it your problem? Suppose I just wrote a sonnet sitting here in my spare time. I don't want others to know it though so I'll only share it under extremely-controlled circumstances for a lot of money to maintain this artificial scarcity. Why is it your moral imperative for you to crush my carefully-maintained monopoly on my stupid little sonnet?

You ask a good question, and to be honest: I don't have a good answer to it yet. I'm still trying to work out a consistent position on the whole topic. Therefore I'm going to give you a rather tentative view.

I currently feel there's a spectrum of cultural importance on media. On the one end, you have your sonnet, that few people even know exists. On the other end, you have Game of Thrones.

At some point a piece of media becomes so widespread that it becomes a part of shared culture. It could meaningfully affect everyone[0], like Harry Potter or even Game of Thrones (I'd expect everyone to be at least aware of its existence). Or a subculture, like Star Trek or Star Wars for people with even passing interest in science fiction (or STEM), or StarCraft for people into PC video games. These works weave themselves into the fabric of society - people lift phrases from them, make metaphors referencing them. Hogwarts is the modern Troy. Being unable to access these works - especially at the same time everyone else around you is perusing them and talking about them - becomes cultural isolation.

With books, we have it solved, thanks to libraries. Almost anyone can get legal access to almost any written work - where they don't have the money, they can substitute it with effort, to get to a library (and possibly convince the library to buy the work, or fetch it through inter-library loan, etc.).

With music and movies, we had it solved in the past too. You could be exposed to popular works through radio and TV, both private and public. This worked better pre-Internet, because while media distribution was regional, the culture was also regional. Not so today - with the spread of the Internet, the culture became international almost overnight. With Internet, enough of us in Poland can enjoy Game of Thrones simultaneously with the rest of the world that it becomes expected of everyone to enjoy it in lockstep with the whole planet.

Videogames gained mainstream popularity around the same time Internet did, so there was never an equivalent of a library, or public broadcasting, for games. You either buy one or pirate it. If a game suddenly gains worldwide popularity[1] and every one of your friends is playing it, you'll either buy it or pirate it, just so you can feel included in their conversation.

And that's ultimately the main justifying factor I'm currently exploring: entertainment media are social objects. One of their most important roles is to glue communities together, by giving people shared experiences to talk about. Once a work becomes popular enough, I can't really blame people who pirate it because they too want to be a part of the conversation.

The sonnet from your example? It isn't popular at all, it isn't part of culture, so I'd consider pirating it as an act of malice. My view would change if I suddenly started seeing it mentioned on the news.

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[0] - Not everyone everyone, as there are plenty of people with little to no access to Western media. It's much less than 50% of the planet, but much more than "the West", so I don't feel writing the latter would be right either - so where I say "everyone" in this thread, it is to mean "everyone within the broadly understood sphere of influence of the Western culture".

[1] - Which doesn't happen by accident; a lot of money and effort goes into marketing, in order to make this happen. And piracy was historically a part of it, too: few people actually bought originals of Diablo or StarCraft or Red Alert in Central and Eastern Europe, and yet they were hugely influential there, all thanks to folks with CD burners in their trucks.

Your premise for why diamonds are a scam seems to be that you don’t personally see any value in them. Which is a perfectly fine position to have, but it doesn’t make them a scam. Everybody sees value in some things that other people don’t. Diamonds are essentially useless, but so is a painting. You might find them austentatious or distasteful, but that doesn’t make them a scam either.

Your argument about their scarcity being artificial also seems pretty flawed to me. Naturally occurring diamonds are genuinely scarce, and most people value them differently from lab created ones (as they are free to do). Perhaps those people are just being stupid, but they’re no more stupid than all the other people in the world who find value in useless things. It’s not illegal to make lab made diamonds, they’re freely available on the market. But just like a pixel-perfect print of the Mona Lisa, they’re not valued quite as much as the real thing.

I consider natural diamonds specifically to be a scam, where paintings aren't, because both the symbolism and the scarcity of them were created by a single company, through a very long and thorough marketing effort.

Well you’re just mistaken about this.

I presume you’re talking about De Beers (as this is such an often repeated meme)? Their market share is ~23%.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/585450/market-share-of-d...

They’re also quite tightly regulated by the EU, and since 2006 have been prohibited from buying stock from Alrosa (the actual largest diamond supplier in the world). So their scarcity is most certainly not artificially maintained by De Beers, as people so often like to claim.

Am I? DeBeers may not have the major market share now, but I'm talking about how they, in a process that started over a hundred years ago, single-handedly turned diamonds into symbol of love, and held a monopoly position on them until recent times.

See e.g. https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-de-beers-2011-12?...

Since we can agree that they don’t have a monopoly, we can agree that they don’t artificially create scarcity.

You’re also quite narrowly focusing on the romance angle (which is the result of successful marketing, not artificially induced scarcity). I don’t think Quavo wears an iced-out AP as a symbol of love, for instance.

The artificial scarcity argument simply defies logic. The entire worlds supply of natural diamonds was created hundreds of millions of years ago, and the earth is done making them.

No, but it justifies artificially creating perfect copies of diamonds.

Of course I chose an analogy which sidestepped IP questions to focus on the moral issue of defending piracy based on the price.

If your argument is against IP though, why is the price relevant? You support IP laws as long as the price is one you personally find reasonable, so it's basically a system of voluntary donations then?

I haven't personally drawn a hard line in the question of whether or not IP law as a whole is good or bad. I hate to use this cop-out answer, but it depends.

I'm sorry for jacking your analogy, but I think it holds water. Diamonds are not inherently valuable (to the degree they are priced at retail). They are valuable because of an exploitative supply chain and social manipulation efforts spanning decades. Which does not justify robbing stores and potentially causing physical or mental harm to innocent shopkeepers. But very much justifies replicating the product to render those practices worthless and hopefully deter them from happening more.

The same goes for educational textbooks in many (but far from all) cases. Personally I've had professors who assigned their own books at very reasonable prices and apologize profusely for them costing money to begin with. I've had others who peddled their own expensive books while themselves handing out copies (!) of books by other authors. I wouldn't dream of pirating the former, but I'm pirating the shit out of the latter if I can.

The reason I sidestep the IP issue is I am personally much more favorable to that argument, however I didn't see it as relevant when people are labeling market behavior as "predatory". It's not to corner people into an easier target so much as to restrict the debate to the issue I take actual exception with. This idea of labeling something as "price gouging" as a moral defense for anything really. If someone owns something then they are free to ask whatever price they want, up to refusing to sell it at all. That's what ownership means.

> If someone owns something then they are free to ask whatever price they want, up to refusing to sell it at all. That's what ownership means.

Yes, I agree this is what ownership means in principle. I think the more practical view of ownership is what the current monopolist of violence will let you do with what you possess. The monopolist of violence in most cases being your local government.

There are many real-world examples of being regulated in what you can or can not do with what you ostensibly own. Whether that's real estate, natural resources or intellectual property. Even IP has expiration dates defined by regulators. Do those expiration dates incontrovertibly define what is morally right or wrong to do with said IP? Were the regulators directed by divine mandate when setting those expiration dates?

> It's not to corner people into an easier target so much as to restrict the debate to the issue I take actual exception with.

Just so I'm fully aware of what we're currently debating, is it this?:

> This idea of labeling something as "price gouging" as a moral defense for anything really.

In which case, here's an example in which I personally believe theft is morally justified. Let's say your family is caught in a natural disaster, and you need fresh water to survive. A local opportunist saw the disaster coming and stockpiled all local water sources at low prices, and is now attempting to sell you water for the reasonable sum (when compared to the alternative option of death) of your life savings.

I'm curious about your position on this (intentionally extreme) example. Not as a trick question, but because I'd like to know how rigidly you adhere to the concept of ownership being morally just in all cases. If you still believe theft is morally wrong in this case, that's fine - it just means we believe opposite things.

If you want to argue that IP is not real ownership and should not exist, then I cannot make a good counter-argument. Except to say that it is the system we have and to eliminate it would simply shift the debate to whatever new business model the video game or textbook publishers switched to.

As for your price-gouging case, an ethical quandary would remain if you were completely broke and dying of thirst no matter how reasonably the water was priced. And/or if the seller was just a neighbor who actually didn't want to sell at all but just keep it for himself. How is it more moral to keep and refuse to sell at any price than to keep unless someone offers you a high enough price? You must either think theft when needed to preserve life is morally justified or not.

> You must either think theft when needed to preserve life is morally justified or not.

If I must take a binary position, then yes. Theft when needed to preserve life is morally justified. In fact, it happens every day on a massive scale. Governments around the world seize up to half of what their citizens earn and redistribute it according to the needs of the whole, for example in order to save lives or support those who cannot support themselves for any of a number of reasons. I support the argument that taxation is theft, but not that it is wrong.

> If you want to argue that IP is not real ownership and should not exist [...]

I don't want to argue that IP is not real ownership. I want to argue that there is no such thing as real ownership, whether the property in question is physical or intellectual. Practical ownership is only what can be enforced through the monopolization of violence. Governments have the power to assert ownership of their citizens' earnings, but for the most part choose to allow citizens the privilege of keeping a portion of those earnings and pretend that they own the goods and services those earnings pay for.

This discussion has strayed quite a bit from the initial question of whether or not piracy = theft = bad. By challenging the reality of ownership, I'm trying to challenge the assertion that piracy is inherently bad because it infringes on ownership and ownership is a fundamental quality of the universe that cannot be rightly infringed upon.

That we choose to adopt certain principles, such as that of ownership, and act as if those principles are "true" in order to make sense of the world, is a perfectly legitimate practice, and I don't believe that you are wrong to do so.

I think it is ethically ok to rob diamond stores if somehow you are forced to possess diamonds and diamonds are only available through a prohibitively expensive and exploitative market.

Like textbooks written by the professors actually holding the lecture that change tiny bits every semester, especially in information relevant to coursework, to make used textbooks essentially worthless.

No we don't do that. One of the most popular questions the first day of class is whether a prior edition of the textbook will suffice. It is very commonly accepted, especially if changes are minor. Authors offer big sweeping improvements to attract buyers. Used textbooks are a robust business.

And the simple fact is you are not forced to possess textbooks nor attend the university, no matter how beneficial it may be to do so. This is how people rationalize all forms of crime.

> And the simple fact is you are not forced to possess textbooks nor attend the university, no matter how beneficial it may be to do so. This is how people rationalize all forms of crime.

This is a good argument. I'll try to speak for others when I say that the problem is with professors who actively engage in predatory behavior to gouge students. I appreciate that's not the norm, but it happens enough to at least be perceived as a major problem.

The predatory behavior lies in identifying a group of people who already have considerable sunk cost in their education, and then using a combination of methods (such as decreeing a monopoly by assigning your own books, and creating scarcity by insisting on this year's revised edition) to force them to purchase material or potentially waste the enormous sunk cost already incurred.

You write "we" don't do that, so I'm assuming you're a professor who assigns, and maybe even writes, textbooks. I'm sorry if this whole thread is turning into a personal attack on you. For my part, it absolutely isn't meant to be that. It's an attack on predatory practices that (a minority of) members of all professions occasionally engage in. This time the profession in question happens to be university professors.

I think few people have problems with IP law in and of itself. We have problems with the weaponization of said laws to exploit those in vulnerable positions.

I don't see this as defending myself from an attack but as debating the logical basis of an ethical position that strikes me a purely emotional. In my initial comment I already pointed out trying to pick cheap textbooks. But people wanted to go after the easier target of expensive textbooks, so fine.

The more people pirate textbooks the more publishers will pivot to a business model where they can make money. Such as with online software instead (they're already doing some of that with software like Pearson's MyLab, which forces students to buy the book anyway to get a license). At which point we're back to the same argument about the freedom to set prices.

> In my initial comment I already pointed out trying to pick cheap textbooks. But people wanted to go after the easier target of expensive textbooks, so fine.

Expensive textbooks are not the easier target, they are the only target. What people find issue with are certain predatory practices by a minority of bad actors.

I think it's great that you make an effort to pick more affordable textbooks, and I hope that your students are paying for them.

But I started this thread talking about students pirating these cheap textbooks, which got hijacked to feed the expensive textbooks narrative.

No. But I’m under no pressure to purchase diamonds.

So property ownership is protected as long as you don't feel you need it?

In practise, yes. Monopolising the only water source in town will get your property seized by the majority right quick; why should the legal system pretend otherwise?

No. This isn’t “as long as you feel you need it”. This is the seller abusing its position to demand the buyer to buy its own product.

If someone punch me first, I’ll punch back. It doesn’t mean that I think it’s okay to punch people in general, but sometimes it’s warranted.