There's absolutely a difference. If you produce a physical good, and somebody takes it, you no longer have it. If you produce a digital good and somebody copies it, you still have the original, you're still free to use and enjoy it as you see fit.
Fundamentally property rights are a negative right: you have the right not to have your stuff taken. Negative rights don't conflict with eachother, that's why they make a good basis for society. Intellectual property is a positive right: you have the right to control how other people use their property, which conflicts with people's right to use their property as they see fit.
You can absolutely argue that IP law is cynically applied, but in principle it protects high capital and low operating expense businesses from those who would like to do the low operating expense part without bothering about the high capital part.
We need to collectively stop using these kinds of physical goods analogies in discussions about piracy. To claim that there is no difference is a fundamental miscalculation.
To be clear, I do not condone piracy. I purchase the content that I view. But these kinds of fallacious analogies are misleading and dangerous to Internet freedom.
Fundamentally, it's the same problem - producers have to adjust their prices to reflect the threat to their income. If I produce something, and I forecast X% of my overall market to be stolen, I have to adjust my selling price according. It doesn't matter if that something is physical or digital.
If I produce something that is digital I have the luxury of being able to reduce the cost as low as I like to capture as much value as I can, but that is still my choice as the producer.
The bottom line is it there is a lot of nuance here, and simple analogies that make one act appear to be the same as the other lead to some reductionist conclusions that have been repeatedly taken up by lawmakers who do not understand these nuances.
-[0] https://phys.org/news/2015-04-downloading-ethics-digital-pir...
I’ve been transitioning away from a career in tech into creating educational content for a niche I love, and I’m sensitive to the need for recourse. At the same time, I think I’m far less likely as an individual creator to have much recourse because I don’t have a team of lawyers.
This is the other aspect of these piracy discussions that always bothers me. It’s really the behemoths vs. individuals, which to me points at very misaligned thinking when it comes to the resulting policy/laws.
Digital goods have far more legal protection against this than physical ones.
They are not the same.
There is zero difference between a digital and physical item if you are the producer. A digital good has the cost of production front loaded, it just has next to zero marginal cost. That may be the cost of education and experience, for example. If you make something of value, you absolutely have the right to choose how you are rewarded - if the buyer decides that choice isn't right for them, you can either change the offer or you look for your next customer. You may choose to give it away, if your reward is the satisfaction of someone using it, but that is your choice, not the consumer's.