I mean, what alternative do people suggest for these companies? That they ignore it, thus tacitly approve it, until everyone uses and doesn't bother with legal avenues? I hear a lot about "Well, find a new business model!", without explaining why a company should be forced to change based on clearly illegal activity. Even accepting the pragmatic argument that "It's going to happen anyway", I'm curious as to what business model people are suggesting?

Any company that solely depend on government granted monopolies for their businesses model will have a hard time to claim a moral high ground or demand that the sovereign of foreign countries should be violated.

The business model I would suggest is one that do not solely depend on government grants. That would likely be to produce a product or rendering a service that others are willing to pay for.

That mean you don't own that car. Its the government car that they have given to you under a granted permission to use it. Same goes for your house. All they need to render the third amendment void is taking back their granted permission. Basically we are now describing a capitalistic governed country like the US as if it worked like an communist controlled one.

So before I continue down this line, do you really claim that government is the rightful owner of everyones property? If not, then we must separate physical property with government granted permissions.

Your trouble stems from a boot-strapping problem. Property ownership doesn't exist in the statute of nature. Thus, the government doesn't need to "own" property in order to grant rights to it.

What exists in the state of nature is control of territory (or anything) by virtue of force. The government's right to grant monopolies in the form of exclusive property rights doesn't derive from its ownership of say land, but from its dominance over that land through force as against any other entity.

I see the subtlety of the point you are making - that property is defined collectively (otherwise it is mere possession) - but I am making an equally subtle point about the underlying meaning of that definition: that collective responsibility is just a statistic on a population of individuals, not a statistic about an entity.

There, I've tilted at my windmill for the day.

We now live in a world where the machines needed to copy things are commonly owned by individuals. Copyright, having been designed to regulate industry, is massively out of date -- individuals do not have the resources needed to decide if they are abiding by copyright. Even the entertainment companies that cry about the importance of copyrights know this, which is why they keep pushing for DRM. No sane person actually believes that normal people are going to stop and think about whether or not they are obeying copyright laws; that is just not how people generally behave.

The truth is, in the 21st century copyright is nothing more than a red flag law that exists solely to protect obsolete industries.

What people have in the absence of government is not property, but merely possession. No more or less binding on anyone else than a dog with a bone.

You have to wonder if the framers talked about our actual natural rights in such disrespectful terms: "The saying there shall be no monopolies lessens the incitement to ingenuity, which is spurred on by the hope of a monopoly for a limited time, as of 14 years; but the benefit even of limited monopolies is too doubtful to be opposed to that of their general suppression."

Does this strike you as being even remotely analogous to the situation faced by the people who make television, movies, books, and music?

So what? The previous poster's point is that both forms of property are social contracts. All private property, physical or otherwise, are nothing but societal agreements, regardless of whether there is a written record or what point in history the agreement began.

The same goes for any other form of permissions. If I get a government permission to sell drugs or produce weapons, I would not call that a property right, comparable to the car I own. The permission to enter a house is not comparable to the property right of the person who owns the house.

If we look at copyright specific, it is an intrusion into the property right of others. Its not just a permissions, but also a restrictions of the actually property owners rights. By calling copyright a property equal to physical objects, we are making the term property meaningless to the point of contradiction.

No. The internet has rendered the "taking your stuff" part obsolete. When you "take my stuff" I no longer have "my stuff". However when you "copy my bits" I still have "my bits". It is the essential difference between Property and Intellectual not-actually-Property.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalry_%28economics%29

Many things are in this category, not just IP. Paying for them can be kind of tricky, because who wants to spend a year, say, writing a book when someone decides they can just go ahead and copy it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#Possible_solutions

IP has been a pretty good, if imperfect solution to the problem. Those wishing to be rid of it ought to either try and suggest another way of producing information goods, or be honest enough to say they have no idea and that information goods that require substantial time and effort may not be produced in large quantities in their imagined future.

I still write software for money. GNU/Linux is still doing rather well. Thanks to the law, I still get to make that business model choice.

However, I do not confuse a car with a piece of software or music track. If we are discussing moral rights, or "property", we cannot have such a discussion without being clear on our terms. Nobody is smacked on the head, nor any "stuff" taken, when someone torrents an MP3. However, people continue to die having their "stuff" taken.

The best books I've read were written by people who weren't financially motivated. Is it just me?

You make a copy, you own me money. You decide to keep that money instead, and it's the moral equivalent of reneging on a debt or bouncing a check.

All forms of property are a government granted monopoly. God doesn't give you a monopoly over your lawn or the things you create with your hands, Uncle Sam does.

Copyright, trademark, patents, etc., are different; they were not considered natural rights, but are a social engineering effort, attempting to produce specific effects in society ("the progress of science and the useful arts", e.g.) by means of government-subsidized policy.

As an analogy, consider another government-granted monopoly, say taxi medallions. They're quite valuable in some markets. But they're entirely an artificial right, created by the city for the city's own reasons, not an inherent one.

Or on the opposite side, consider e.g. liberty or free speech. In the American or liberal conception, those are innate, inalienable rights. We create a government that hopefully helps us exercise those rights, but the rights inhere directly in us--- they are not granted by the government or some other third party.

Literally every business that relies on any kind of stock, real estate, or other form of property depends on the government for the security of that property. Yes, their survival depends - in part - on providing a decent product or service at an acceptable price, but it also depends on having the backing of a state that can inflict serious, life-changing harm on the Takers who have no regard for reciprocity, who will simply grab whatever they want with no recompense whatsoever, and who will continue doing so until they are physically thrown in jail.

These people aren't a majority. Heck, they aren't even a significant minority. But they're common enough to make the difference between profit and loss in any remotely competitive business.

Anarcho-libertarians are loath to admit this, but civilization depends of putting these people behind bars, along with the murderers, rapists, kidnappers, forgers, fruadsters, and other thugs who cannot suppress their own desires reliably enough to behave with decency and reciprocity.

A respectable country will do everything it can to limit incarceration to those who pose genuine, active threats to the persons and property of others. It will not subject them to cruel or unusual punishment that goes beyond their removal from the free population. And it will do whatever is possible to rehabilitate them so they they can become functioning members of society.

But make no mistake - it will throw those fuckers into jail without remorse if they decide to steal instead of deal. In a country ruled by law, businesses can count on this protection. Indeed, it's what they bank on, which is why well-governed countries tend to be far more prosperous than those that tolerate pernicious criminality.

This is begging the question. The activity is illegal in the first place because of lobbying by the recording industry starting in the late 1800s/early 1900s.

If so, please send me the details so I can keep an eye on you. Anyone else who's so inclined, reply as well. I'd love to grab a few zero-effort passive income generators.

Everything else, I'm totally fine with. If you're better at using and marketing my code than I am, fork me over at will. Just don't pretend to be me.

edit: also, if you can exploit my code so much better than I can, consider hiring me. I'm cheap, I don't need a lot of space, and I'm extremely familiar with your codebase.

I support the use of trademarks to prevent consumer confusion; I don't support the abuse of trademarks (e.g. to attempt to suppress commentary, comparison, or criticism). I also support short-term copyrights for the benefit of authors, performers, and creators. I don't support the current system where copyrights can extend beyond 100 years.

Tell you what: if I still have legal control over and working backups of my startup's software 28 years from now, you can contact me and I'll send you a CC0-licensed copy of my most recent release as of this date (Apr. 25, 2013).

Relevant laws found on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_of_1831 (added musical compositions to US copyright)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_of_1909 (added mechanical reproduction (piano rolls, phonographs) and public performances to US copyright)

Copyright was began with an effort to simplify tyranny, and later evolved into a way to promote the interests of the publishing industry. Neither of those are relevant to today's world; we do not want the Star Chamber and the publishing industry is no longer necessary to spread information and entertainment. Why, then, should we keep copyright around?

What's your real problem here? Are you smart but dishonest? Or are you just a complete idiot? Because there's no way an informed person of good will could say something as obviously wrong as that. Seriously, publishers do a hell of a lot more than just "spread" information an entertainment. They actually produce the goddamn stuff. Moreover, they do so by putting billions (with a b) at risk. And thank goodness for that, since producing top-flight media remains an insanely difficult, expensive, and risky thing to do.

And that's the reason copyright exists: to ensure when some of the bets these publishers place do turn into giant booming successes, they can actually recover enough of their investment to remain profitably engaged in the production business.

An an institution, copyright has problems galore, but as Churchill said of democracy "is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."

To say "a site who's sole purpose is enabling the illegal downloading" is not completely true. File sharing has more legitimate uses than illegal ones. See Dropbox for details.

They have unsustainable economies due to excessive public welfare programs and unfavorable demographics. Being outside the EU wouldn't magically solve those problems, though it would let them monetize some debt.

And there you have it.

Yes the problems won't magically go away. "They have unsustainable economies due to excessive public welfare programs and unfavorable demographics" can be said about most countries.

But of course GDP growth y/y is sustainable ad infinitum.

Here in the USA, when we run out of money we can print some more and pass the cost to nations who use the USD in foreign exchange (Kudos for China and Australia for trying to get out of this hole). But in the EU, they have to appease the troika before they run some database queries. (And as we have seen with cyprus, now you also have to sell an arm and a leg, what's next?)

In the world where central banks are openly buying stock with their freshly minted database queries…what could go wrong?

That's not even close to invasion if that's what you meant. I really can't imagine that anyone would come close to invading Iceland just because they host a domain.

And the supreme court just trashed Mastercard for denying service to Wikileaks and its payment provider, DataCell. The verdict includes daily fines that would amount to 2.5 million dollars a year if they choose to continue denying services. (800k ISK daily fines = 292 million ISK yearly ~ 2.54 million USD)

I have high hopes for my country, and I know I'll be the first to go protest if they try to shut it down. Also, The Pirate Bay and file sharing in general has HUGE public support and the response in icelandic media has been nothing but positive, with responses from SMAIS (the icelandic version of RIAA/MPAA) being ridiculed and mocked.