naive Wrote:The supply of information is not infinite though and simply sharing the knowledge can devalue it. If all people treated information as you do and stole it, you would see the information supplies you love and depend on dry up in an instant. It takes resources to produce the information in the first place. If I had the knowledge of all the lottery ticket numbers for all time and no one else did it would be very valuable, law has nothing to do with this. If those same lottery numbers get released to the public they become worthless as everybody will win the lottery. The same thing goes for casinos, stocks, commodities, sport games, almost everything.

Who would pay you for an ad at the beginning of your movie, if they can just download your movie, remove your ads, and send it through their own distribution chanels perhaps more successfully than you. If you think you can get your youtube movie into theatres better than a large corporation would, I believe you are mistaken. What if they specialize in this and have better merchandising capabilities and essentially can just out compete you on everything except for your innovation. Does this make your innovation worth nothing? The very mediums such as movie theaters where you may expect income from could steal the work from you, charge people to see it, and remove your ads. You wouldn't get paid, you wouldn't be able to recover your expenses, you would not have a business capable of producing films.

If the only way to justify the production of a million dollar movie is to charge people to see it, you are simply using an exploitative method of depriving the creator of their ability to recover their expenses. You are gaining value from the creators effort without compensation to them. You may think that their policies are flawed, but you are still depriving them of control over their work.

If scientific researchers are unable to profit off of their work, there is no incentive to invest in scientific research. If it takes 100 million to develop a cancer curing drug, but the second you invent it a specialized drug counterfeiting company with zero investment in the technology brings it to market before you.. it would be unreasonable to expect anyone to invest in high valued information and research, it would always be cheaper to steal someone else's work. The cost to produce a single pill for the inventor would be 100 million, but to the counterfeiter, it might only be 10 cents worth of chemicals. Does this mean that inventors and content producers simple are not competing well enough because one is cheaper than the other?

Without any form of copywrite protections, large media organizations that specialized in stealing works, advertising, and distribution could simply use their leverage to keep your version of movies out of theatres entirely, and modify/edit change your works without crediting you at all. Underdogs essentially would not be able to compete against highly specialized counterfeiting operations that have no need to recoup development costs.

If you assume that all information is free, and development costs are zero then your claim that piracy helps science would be valid. This is false however, and if one is not able to recoup development costs then there is no incentive financially to push science forward.

If anything, your argument is based on the fact that since piracy exists media, is worthless. If piracy did not exist and the risk of stealing the data from the source was too high, the information would therefore natural retain its value. If it were limited to official distribution channels then the concept that it is easily recreated would not be applicable.

You may disagree with Windows DRM, but no one is forcing you to use windows or a computer at all. The fact that you rely on the operating system means that information that microsoft spends millions of dollars producing has value to you. If you could not steal it, you would likely buy it or go to a cheaper competitor. By simply pirating microsoft windows, you are not only depriving microsoft of their ability to recoup costs/profits, but you are also depriving would be competitors from bringing better products to the market as you make their potential market smaller also.

A world in which piracy is legally acceptable would make it difficult for many different types of new technology to be worth the risk for investors to develop.

I'm all for big media being replaced by piracy friendly alternatives, but my opinion about their work does not inherently give me the right to do anything I want with it. If you didn't build it, it's not yours. The ease of your ability to take the information does not indicate that is has no value, it indicates that it's easy to steal.

It's just like US currency. It's information. It costs virtually nothing to produce, and is only valuable based on the information that it represents. Its ability to be traded is what gives it value, if usd was able to be easily counterfeited like movies are, it too would have no trade value. While I do not view USD as a very sound form of currency, I am by no means about to claim that it has no value. If people want it, and you have it, and people will give you something to get it, it has value. Tell me, would it be ethical for the US MINT to print 100 trillion dollars and share it with their friends? No, it is unethical because it undermines the entire basis of economic trade based on that commodity.


Do you think real pirates would have tried to ethically defend robbing ships? No, they wanted what other people had and so they took it. That's all. That's what real pirates fucking are.

If I were to try to ethically defend media piracy though, I would have to base it more on the concept that if public resources are allocated to its distribution or production, I should be compensated in some way. If a television network makes profit airing their work over public airwaves, I feel that the work should at least be partially entered into public domain by default. They are depriving the public of clean radio waves, therefore compensation should be necessary in my opinion. For cable only networks, well they lay waste to a large portion of nature to deliver their content, so I feel that those works should enter public domain also.

As for movies, fuck em. I literally would watch no movies unless they were free if I didn't pirate them and I pay to take my girl to movies I would never generally watch anyways. I figure that makes me even. Generally if I have genuine excitement about a movie I will pay to see it opening night.

Software, I feel really bad about. I don't see any general justification for it. I use linux. I think long term Microsoft has made more money through my familiarization of their software to the extent that I don't force others to use linux. Everything else, well I'm just a bad person.

If corporations treat the general public poorly, I suppose you could justify piracy of their products as a form of protest against such practices.

You can have an economy of information that has free and unlimited distribution of information, but the incentive to produce the information is only there if ownership can be retained.

tl;dr  Information won't just disappear if it were freely given. Freely giving information is a fundamental property of the net and always has been. The ability to send an email, post to a board like this, or surf any website for answers is an inherit part of the web. There's nothing wrong with trying to make money on it, but there is something wrong (at least to me) with trying to stop any of this on a mass scale.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-copyright
http://www.infoanarchy.org/en/upload/2/ ... l_Info.png