I'd vote for both as evil because I also don't see much social benefit in hooking people into clickfarming their way through mindless reward loops. But pirate sites are the lowest because by abusing internet freedoms they give censors the ammunition they need to lobby for tools that will inevitably be abused to restrict more important freedoms.

Or said in another way, a lot of hackers understand that in a market, value is unrelated to cost of production, while others who produce "content" don't.

Art, fashion, antiques, and a slew of others that I won't bother to think of, have absolutely no correlation.

Virtually every other market has only a small degree of correlation: the primary drivers are supply and demand, not underlying cost.

Can you name a market that is entirely driven by cost alone? (Note that I say "market", as opposed to a government-driven exchange)

Supply is a function of profit potential. Production cost isn't the only factor but pretending it's irrelevant is ridiculous.

Torrent site serves up 1000 pirated DVDs, making $20 in the process. Only 1 out of those 1000 pirates would pay the $10 required to buy a DVD [1]. Assuming as little as 2 cents of consumer value per pirated DVD, this scenario has generated $10 more income for 'businesses' and $10 more consumer surplus.

Zynga copies a game that would have had 1000 customers otherwise. They're Zynga, so they get 1500 customers and the original creators get 100. Unfortunately, this makes the game unprofitable for the original creators and the development dollars Zynga had to spend copying the game are not offset by the 600 extra players they generated. Furthermore, this game is seen as a substitutable good- no real consumer value is generated when Coke is drunk instead of Pepsi.

(Honestly, I think consumer surplus is the intuitive reason people support file lockers and not Zynga. They're probably right.)

[1] This is the only conversion rate I've seen people give actual numbers for. Citation available if requested.

You imply Zynga is able to clone a game before the original even reaches 10% of its expected sales. Even mobile and facebook games tend to make most of their money early in their life. I don't think it's possible for Zynga to identify and clone a game this quickly.

You also imply that once Zynga enters the competition, it takes 90-100% of the sales away from the original. This is enormous. Zynga does add some value to games, and it cutens them up a bit too, but you claim it's mostly substitutable. So why are 90% of the people who would have found and played the original game now choosing the Zynga game?

And finally, you imply that Zynga only attracts a marginal number of players, despite the fact that Zynga spends most of its money on marketing to attract new players.

I don't think your numbers are anywhere near the ballpark.

Please do :)

Legal isn't always right, and its dual.

people get really upset about plagiarism and see it as dishonesty or fraud, as well as theft. history is rife with good (or at least gray) works of plagiarism that people would miss, such as "make em' laugh" in "singin' in the rain," which is a complete ripoff of "be a clown" by cole porter. not a parody, a ripoff with no attribution. (porter never complained.)

still, you find a larger portion of humanity is pissed off by plagiarism, where more people think copies are copies are copies, at least they help make the author famous or rich as a kind of advertising if attribution stays intact.

plagiarism is less likely to help the author of the original, but it can sometimes. for example, i hadn't heard anything about joe satriani for about a decade until coldplay allegedly plagiarized some guitar riffs from him. i've listened to both and apparently you need to be a musician to tell. at least i couldn't tell.

i like that riffs get reused sometimes, and so i don't think it's always easy to have a black and white view about plagiarism. i've neither defended zynga nor joined in condemnation.