I wonder if it's not more like "designer cloths shouldn't be copyrighted" - which is actually true in the fashion world. And because of that tens if not hundreds of millions of people can get "cheap cloths" that look good.

Similar idea would be that ideas of movies and video games should not be copyrighted. IANAL, but there are many many similar movies and video games and don't think there are any copyright infringements unless you create a video game with almost identical name, etc.

That's because they're copying the ideas and not the implementation, copyright protects implementations ("works") and not the ideas behind them (at least that's the intention).

Similar names would be trademark law rather than copyright FWIW.

I used to pirate stuff much more when I was younger (a poor student). Now, I often pay for music that I really like, to support the artists! Other music I just watch on YouTube. If I was sure that Netflix would provide a better service than downloading (i.e. good quality, little wait time, superb selection, offline viewing, no geo-restrictions), I would subscribe.

It's absolutely been demonstrated to be true, many many times. Do you think game studios, console makers, movie studios etc put money into DRM because none of them understand their own business?

There are lots of people who spoken either on or off the record who say the same things: the moment their copy protection fails, sales fall off a cliff and you can see it in the data. For video games it's even worse. The general figure I see for video game piracy on the PC platform is around 90-95% of players are not paying for it, yet, often they are still consuming resources on e.g. multiplayer servers.

Movie studio executives have graphs of sales and you can see the point at which high quality rips were uploaded to the internet.

Example:

http://www.develop-online.net/news/lgc-2013-sports-interacti...

Hang on a sec. If you pirate games, you can't get online on the official servers, that's the whole downside to pirating and the reason so many games now require always-online. Once the game is released through a torrent site, that's it, the developer has no more hand in it. The whole point of cracking a game is to cut the umbilical cord of DRM and online-based play.

Plus, DRM is its own detriment. Some days ago I saw Child of Light on sale on Steam and was going to buy it, but then noticed it has uPlay DRM. And as we all know uplay means nobuy.

Personally, I'd rather have no DRM and less games, than more games that need to strongarm people into paying.

Might be. But the cost to produce Candy Crush Saga and a AAA title is, well, different. But if you try to find a non-digital analogy, e.g. food, it doesn't make it right for me to steel expensive whisky just because I don't agree with pricing model :)

>>> I used to pirate stuff much more when I was younger (a poor student)

Agree with this, I perfectly know what you mean. When I was a poor student, I would buy a video game once a year on my b-day and keep playing it for a year or two :) completely objective, but it felt really better than downloading a batch on games. But that's not the point :)

This is a different problem (pricing, not intellectual property). HumbleBundle sometimes has games by big publishers for $1, Steam has good weekend sales sometimes (grabbed a few relatively new good games for under $15). I think solution to provide poorer markets can be found in this direction.

It did no such thing. It provided a searchable list of user-generated content. It was no different than hacker news or reddit. It was used in a fashion that facilitated "crimes", but so are computers, Internet, and cash in general.

Nor is it especially relevant that computers, cash, the Internet, etc. all facilitate crimes, in some sense. TPB is easily distinguishable because its express purpose, and dominant actual use, is to facilitate crime.

I do respect that Sunde was willing to go to jail for his cause. But given the dubious specific goals of TPB as it was actually operated (despite whatever ideology might have supported or motivated it) I can't say that I'm particularly cowed by his moral courage generally.

Stop repeating that. It isn't. Even the courts agree on this one.

And TPB did not engage in it either way.

As a content creator, shouldn't I have the opportunity to give away my products (or sell them) in a way that I see fit?

So you can easily control initial distribution. But to restrict further distribution you have to restrict actions of others. You have to limit their freedoms to do with that new copy of information.

Is there a good reason to limit their freedoms? Maybe. But it doesn't occur to me as a natural right. Once you handed over a copy to someone else each of you control an identical set of information. You severed your ties.

So if you want the rights of others restricted then - in my opinion - the burden of constructing a case why they should be is on you.

... in a way that's not particularly different from the restrictions we place on physical books. JK Rowling doesn't give up her right to control sales/distribution of Harry Potter just because someone bought a hardback edition and owns a scanner or photocopier. Making a pdf or a photocopy of Harry Potter doesn't result in "stealing" any of her physical inventory, but if you resell it or even give it away (private personal use as a backup copy is OK) you can get in serious legal trouble (it would probably be termed "copyright infringement" rather than "theft", but IANAL TINLA.)

If you want to argue that purely digital goods should be handled differently than a digital scan someone made of a physical book, the burden of proof is back on you. Why should Rowling be entitled to sell Harry Potter in dead tree format and be able to treat scans as infringement, but not entitled to sell Harry Potter in digital format while treating unauthorized copies as infringement?

I do not. And those restrictions are exactly the same, they are about information. It's not about the dead trees with some pigment sprinkled onto them. It's about the particular arrangement of ink.

And I also say that I am naturally free to do whatever with the book - and the information therein - once I have obtained it.

If my freedom to do anything with it what I want should be restricted - as above, there may be good reasons to do so - then one would have to explain to me why that is, because I see no natural right that the author have over things they passed on to others.

In US law, you are free to resell the book, but you are not free to produce a copy to resell (or to keep the copy and resell the original). You bought a copy of the book, not the rights to redistribute the content as you see fit; those still reside with the author. Others have made the argument about incentivizing content producers by granting those rights, so I will not rehash them.

(I reject your treatment of "natural law" as the only relevant system; I recognize the additional value of "common law" and "positive law".)

You place me in a tricky position, as I am generally against the limitation of freedom.

Yet, it seems that some basic limitation on freedom is an essential part of society.

In general, the most agreeable limitations involve restricting a person's freedom to harm others.

Have content producers been harmed by piracy? I would argue that they have.

Since piracy harms content producers, the rights of others to infringe on their content should be limited.

If you do not assume such a right then no harm is done.

I don't want to defend the actions of the copy-write robber-barons. I do not know what the appropriate response for infringement should be. I ignore violations of my own content. Yet I believe that I have a right to the content that I produce. And I respect the rights of others' content. Do you believe that content producers should not have these rights?

There is nothing natural about them. But that does not mean that these rights do not exist.

The question I ask you is, to whom should these rights belong?

The entity that has labored to produce the content? Or the entity that has obtained a copy of that content?

In a previous post you said

>"As a content creator, shouldn't I have the opportunity to give away my products (or sell them) in a way that I see fit?"

Which seemed to me like an argument for an intrinsic, natural right that a content creator should have, irrespective of current law.

So either we are arguing over current law, in which case the questions you ask are already settled by courts and we should be discussing whether current law is acceptable.

Or you are arguing about rights that people ought to have, but then you cannot say

>"But that does not mean that these rights do not exist."

If we are arguing about rights that one ought to have then they do no exist a priori, they have to be constructed first.

Describing these in such a way doesn't imply anything about the moral implications.

Secondly, downloading a work under a non-permissive copyright is not theft, and may not even be illegal. Content shifting is a legal thing to do. If I own a DVD one could argue that I could download an already ripped version of the DVD (CSS issues aside).

Third, not everything linked to on TPB was covered under a non-permissive copyright.

Please stop assuming everyone is an idiot and immoral.

Small point, but it actually depends on the country's laws. In New Zealand, it's illegal to do that. It's even illegal to rip a CD you own. It's stupid and would never be enforecd, but it is the law.

It's absurd that there are people there are people waiting cash in hand to get content, and they are denied because of some sort of broken mentality on how content should be distributed.

Calling it theft is using a legal concept that is outmoded for the digital world. Theft implies that an object is removed from someone's possession in order to be taken.

You can argue all you like that it deprives content creators of income (although even that is complex, in many contexts), but it is not, and never will be theft.

In this case we can use the word "culture" instead of "information", and the original point still stands. And I am sure we can all agree that TV and movies are culture.

All in all it's a terrible analogy.

EDIT: By all means go ahead and downvote, but don't forget to explain why the analogy doesn't fail.