The "it's not theft" argument is pedantry. There are lots of ways to obtain things for free that aren't technically theft: extortion, blackmail, fraud, etc. Illegal copying is one of those ways.

Disagree. Even in the extortion, blackmail, and fraud cases, you're removing ownership when you obtain the thing. Copying never removes ownership, so it is not in the same class. It is not theft, and it it not pedantry to claim it is not. It's incorrect to state it is something that it is not to make it sound worse than it is.

I would guess that it's at least a strong minority view -- if not a majority view -- that record labels have abdicated their moral authority to assert transgressions of this kind. It is not unlike patent trolls, where we feel that if someone fails to capitalize on a potential market and in fact attempts (politically, legally, etc.) to hinder the growth there, that they forfeit their right to be wronged.

So I think it's a shame that both sides never seem to get around to Step One, which is to say, "here's what I think the spirit of the law is, here's what I think the purpose of law as a whole is; now, do these conditions efficiently uphold those ideals?"

If those questions are answered then it may not be "pedantry" -- perhaps they think that the purpose of the law is to stop theft, and theft-like deprivations of property. There may or may not be a nuanced argument here; and we won't know until people manifest their assumptions rather than burying them under knee-jerk slogans.

Libel/Slander? Trespassing? Vandalism? Disobeying zoning laws?

http://www.panopta.com/pricing/

I'm not sure what you're asking me. Demanding something is not the same as copyright infringement or theft.

If you're asking why we won't give you the service for what you demand because nobody owns it, I would argue that a service is both physical and finite, so I believe it can be owned. Our service involves physical work being performed, and it is limited by resources, so it being owned such that you cannot demand it is still consistent with my beliefs.

No. I gave you very specific reasons why I believe what I believe. You see hand-waving because you don't want to argue against my reasons, which are clear and logically consistent.

> yet for some reason some other person (musician) somehow is in the wrong for expecting other people to pay for their service and time it took to create their music for your entertainment.

They are not wrong. I like how you put the word "service" in there, because, in fact, they do get paid for their services. Try to hire a musician to put on a show, and you will have to pay. That physical and finite service is owned by the musician, and he trades it for money.

And for the record, a "startup idea" cannot be copyrighted, and they can be and are copied all the time. The closest you can get is patenting a fundamental part of the business model.

You have to remove "by illegal means" from your statement, because you're claiming how copyright infringment is theft, and being illegal doesn't make it theft. It's illegal because it's claimed to be theft.

So your statement becomes "getting something you would normally have to pay for for free." Is this theft? If you could get something for free that you would normally have to pay for, wouldn't most people do it? What is the compelling reason not to?

You can't drop the "by illegal means" part from my statement, on the grounds that copyright infringement isn't theft, because my statement isn't predicated on it being theft, it's predicated on it being illegal behavior. Which it is, on a basis wholly distinct from theft.

"Getting something you would normally have to pay for for free by illegal means" encompasses a wide range of non-theft illegal means: by use of threat (extortion), by use of trick (fraud), etc.

The point is that it's not a very defensible position to say "give me more product at lower prices or I will subvert the law to obtain it for free."

But your statement was being used to show how copyright infringement was equivalent to theft. I think I understand what you're saying now though, is it that copyright infringement and theft are equivalent because they both are illegal and they both acquire something? If so, I would still have to disagree by saying that theft has the important distinction of removing original ownership.

> "Getting something you would normally have to pay for for free by illegal means" encompasses a wide range of non-theft illegal means: by use of threat (extortion), by use of trick (fraud), etc.

It also encompasses a wider range of non-theft legal means: finding deals, being resourceful, doing favors, etc.

When someone says theft in relation to digital music, movies, etc they mean copyright infringement. Do we really need to have these repetitive and anal retentive trips down the rabbit hole every time this topic comes up?

On the plus side, this is happening less and less often, bands I couldn't even find search results for a few years back now have people selling their albums on Amazon marketplace.

I've also talked to guys on the other side of this though, who are trying to get material to market in many different countries at once. It isn't easy, often times some stupid "international distribution agreement" is signed in the far off past with some company that about 5 minutes later decided they didn't want to have anything to do with the band thereafter.

Or music labels in different countries want different agreements that would degrade the user experience, or would upset distributors in other countries that have already signed on, or one of a million other stupid things.

Launching anything internationally isn't easy.

"10 minutes" to set up the site and half a decade of fostering, seeding trust and a community of people who laboriously upload and seed content, and then five years of fighting ISPs, world politics and DDoS attacks to stay running.

What I'll be "finest" with though is paying the artist directly, even at the same rate. I have no interest whatsoever in sponsoring the music industry, as in corporations. I want the artist to receive my money, not some manager, business executive or whatever, because the product I'm interested in is the music itself, not it's promotion.

Morally speaking I'd rather pirate and then paypal some money to the artist to support the good work.

I just want to pay 1/5th of the current cost. Distribution is now free, so why are we still paying for it?

There are plenty of artists who are coming up who charge much less.

The question then is how the ability to pirate affects that "reasonable price" threshold, amongst other hard to quantify effects of piracy.

For some customers it is absolutely too high so they resort to piracy. For others, it is the correct price or even too low. In a perfect world, the seller could use your income to determine price (or some other even better metric for what you are willing to pay) and charge everyone differnet amounts. Very wealthy people would pay huge amounts, impoverished people would pay very low amounts, maybe even nothing.

The question then is how the ability to pirate affects that "reasonable price" threshold, amongst other hard to quantify effects of piracy.

I imagine it pushes the price down slightly, but who knows if the record companies are acting rationally (pricewise) or could even predict the correct price they should charge to max profit. (I imagine they have some very smart people modeling pricing, but models can only get you so close).

Only there's no effort on their side to take your order, and it's way more than 18%.

However, strict ideas of "Intellectual Property" can constitute suppression of freedom of speech. That's a principle we can all get behind. "Intellectual Property" is at least moderately un-American.

Let me guess - you either don't write software for a living or you're lucky enough to write the kind of software that can't easily be copied?

I don't write software for a living right now, but I have in the past. Go right ahead and take a look: http://stratigery.com/source.html Take a copy, too. On the house.

I'll give you an example: a while back I wrote some code in C, to push an element on to a linked list. I forget exactly why, but I ended up passing the head of the linked list as a "struct list " or something like that. That project died, but I kept the function just because I was so proud of it.

Years later, I saw a programming quiz. The question was almost exactly my task. The answer to the question was my function, with the variables renamed.

Independent invention. It ruins "Intellectual Property" as property.

And yes, I'm deliberating conflating copyright and patents, because the rest of the world does so. It's "World Intellectual Property Organization", not dual "World Patent Property Organization" and "World Copyright Property Organization".

http://torrentfreak.com/piracy-is-theft-ridiculous-lost-sale...

> Stealing their stuff just empowers them to get dumb laws passed.

Theft is the removal of ownership. It's not stealing, it's copying.

1) Musicians should be angry with their labels. 2) Musicians should not buy into the bullshit that piracy is decreasing their cut. "Hey man, we'd pay you more, but there's so much piracy going on! The revenues aren't there! You should be mad at the pirates."

The ironic thing is that all the defenders of "free culture" piracy do is drive creators into the arms of Orwellian walled gardens like iTunes and empower legislators to write dumb laws like SOPA.

Maybe they are't as pissed off at the labels as you think?

Many are incredibly pissed at the payment structures. Take a look: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120622/16193319442/myth-d...

TLDR: Spotify has been accused of barely paying artists, when in fact they pay the labels, who in turn barely pay the artists. But if you search for artists who hate Spotify because of their low income, you'll find plenty of rants.

The marginal cost of printing a book is in the pennies because the cost is spread out over millions of books (across multiple titles). Materials only add a dollar or two more in costs. The majority of the cost of a book is in fixed costs prior to printing, i.e., proofreading.

Moreover, distribution costs real money (unless you also own the pipes).

Plenty of people would be willing to pay $10-20 per episode of Game of Thrones to be able to watch it legitimately without Cable+HBO at the same time as cable subscribers. $10-20 seems like a lot, but the series is extremely popular, and the 100-200 per season of GoT still costs the end user less money than cable contract + HBO. Also probably leads to more money in HBO's pockets I'd imagine.

I would pay NBC $60 for a pass to have legitimate access to their Olympic streams and coverage, but instead they require cable login information that I don't have access to because cable and internet are included in my lease.

That way you can burn it to a CD to listen to in your car or put it on your iPod Nano to take to the gym with you, and the file can't be revoked just because Microsoft changed the license. These are completely legitimate use cases. I'm sure such a hypothetical situation would work with Rhapsody or other music subscription services. Various services may embed a code in the file to tie it back to you if it winds up on a sharing site. I don't know if this method would remove that, so I would suggest keeping these files purely for your own benefit.

I was just throwing it out there as a hypothetical situation where someone could have a subscription service and also be able to use their songs as they want to use them. I subscribe to the Zune Pass and I know I have this capability, but I've never actually felt the need to exercise that power.