I haven't attempted to argue whether the original author (note my not accepting the term "owner") will be worse off from the copying. I haven't fixated on that point at all; it never once entered into my reasoning. The original author is a third party to the transaction of copying; they have no standing to object. Party A has data; party A lets party B copy that data. Neither party is the original author, so the original author has no standing in the transaction.
Please do not assume that people who disagree with you must not have put enough thought into it. I have put a great deal of thought into my position on copyright, and I came to a different conclusion than you did. Your analogy provides no new information to lead to any different conclusion. I do not appreciate you dismissively lumping my arguments in with "every nerd ever" and assuming I have not put my own thought into the issue.
> By your own definition, the shopkeeper is "rent seeking" when he charges more than his cost basis for the M&Ms.
No, my own definition had absolutely nothing to do with the cost basis for M&Ms or any other physical product. Please don't attack a strawman. I defined rent-seeking the same way economists do, namely attempting to extract economic rent from a third-party transaction:
'Rent, by contrast with these two, is obtained when a third party deprives one party of access to otherwise accessible transaction opportunities, making nominally "consensual" transactions a rent-collection opportunity for the third party.' -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
That seems to describe copyright quite accurately, doesn't it?
We both obviously agree on about property rights over physical property. Thus, we both obviously agree that the owner of a bag of M&Ms has the right to charge whatever price they see fit, and nobody has the right to take that bag of M&Ms on terms the owner does not approve of. You keep bringing up your analogy, bringing up the obvious absurdity it implies about property, and then trying to jump from there to a conclusion about copying. We fundamentally disagree over whether an author has the right to control the copying of data. To accept your analogy as having any meaning in the context of copying data, I would have to accept the concept of copyright as a property right the author has over the copying of their data. Circular reasoning at its finest, disguised by way of an appealing-sounding analogy.
> Why do you accept one and not the other?
Why do you assume one implies the other? I have no particular reason to think of data as property, so I don't. Why should I believe otherwise?
If you actually think through the scenario I presented, you'll see it's more equivalent to copying than you're crediting. The M&M "cheat" is recouping the M&M owner for their cost of goods sold. The M&M owner is no worse off, because the owner can simply buy another bag of M&Ms and wait for the next "sucker" to come along and pay retail.
This is obviously an absurdity. The person who takes a bag of M&Ms, coughs up the wholesale price, and walks out with the product is obviously guilty of a crime: shoplifting. Everyone agrees with this. But the economic impact to the shopkeeper is the same.
Why do you accept one and not the other?
Please don't write another 20 paragraphs about "rent seeking" and "copying" and plans for chairs. By your own definition, the shopkeeper is "rent seeking" when he charges more than his cost basis for the M&Ms.
You put a lot of effort into writing, obviously. Put a little more effort into thinking. When someone is caught shoplifting, do we have them pay the wholesale price of the item they stole as damages to make the retailer whole? Of course not. If we did that, there would be no disincentive whatsoever to steal; if you win, you get the item free, if you lose, you get a discount. But you're applying that same logic to unlawful downloads. And, lo and behold, there is apparently no incentive whatsoever for anyone to compensate artists.