I think the point is that copyright is no longer physically enforceable. This makes copyright equally silly as giving some people right to experience 365 days and nights of continuous daylight. You could theoretically build a system that houses them on plane that follows the daylight for whole year but this would be so costly that this right would be physically unenforceable. Providing authors with legal copyright protection would be even more costly and only slightly less pointless.

Allow me to clarify--thank you for your feedback.

The rights we're talking about here are not able to be compared to physical property rights because there is no mutual exclusion of access.

If somebody steals my physical property, I can't use it, therefore they've harmed me and limited my actions. For knowledge, IP, etc. they cannot limit my access or permission, so I do not need to be put up guards.

My core argument, I guess, is this: There is no reason to have copyright because it is effectively unenforcable and because it has no real-world grounding. Moreover, it props up an economic model that fails in exposure to modern distribution methods.

The non-rival argument is popular, but not very robust. There is an economic harm by an unauthorized third party increasing the supply and diluting the value to the creator.

Another rough equivalent to criminally using without depleting physical goods is someone who breaks into your house to sleep in your bed while you are on vacation. Even if they are clean, and the bed remains the same afterwards for all reasonable inspection, they have trespassed on your property and guilty of a crime.

So, again, we start to dig into some very deep taboos here, right?

Is it really that bad if somebody who needs a bed uses mine without permission while it lies unused, provided it isn't harmed and is returned to its initial condition?

We're big about virtualization and the cloud and shared hosting, right?

Why not consider something similar for worldly goods? It seems awfully inefficient, with 7 billion people, for everyone to have a unique, untouchable copy of everything.

Is it really that bad if somebody who needs a bed uses mine without permission while it lies unused, provided it isn't harmed and is returned to its initial condition?

Exactly. It's YOUR choice to allow someone to let themselves in when you aren't home and take a nap. BTW, can you post your address and schedule? Just in case anyone reading this thread needs a place to crash for a few hours.

Giving me the right to not have strangers wander into my house while I'm gone does nothing to prevent you from letting strangers wander into your house. By making it ok for people to wander into my house without my permission, you obliterate my property rights.

Ha, well, it's a losing argument if you have to unpack our basic economic, political, and legal system. The solution is not proportional to the problem.

I think parking is a similar problem at a similar societal cost. People need to park. If you provide no way to park legally, they will park illegally to get on with their business. And indeed, fines for piracy, like fines for parking infractions, and a better distribution model from the market, like enough parking lots, have been a winning solution.