Pirate Bay founder's new project shows the absurdity of giving value to copies

You punch someone in the face you think there's going to be any high road? Guess what, you start shit, people react, you make enemies.

>How is piracy and "theft" not about copyright law? If you're not breaking copyright law it's not piracy.

It's because humans are born with the ability to moralize and differentiate from right and wrong without the need for written law. Everybody knows what theft is without referencing copyright law. What I am talking about in my argument is how the theft of value occurs according to the intrinsic law of supply and demand; and the theft of value is morally wrong according to common sense, no need to refer to copyright law.

Let's put it this way... If you rip off someone's secret recipe copyright law may say that you're not wrong, but your conscious will tell you that you're an ass.

>I obviously don't think so. My kind of arguments are the ones being discussed at conferences, in books, documentaries and papers.

Good for you, but guess what, those things discussed in conferences? If it's about copyright law, it's off topic.

>There's a reason I used the word "theoretically". Still a 14 year old is seldom going to buy a $4000 program and companies sometimes recognizes these scenarios. Microsoft did in China for instance.

Theories are used to speculate about the unknown or things not directly observed. When evidence and common sense flies in the face of theory, the theory becomes shit and a new theory is needed. Why even present a flawed theory? Either way it doesn't even matter if a 14 y/o pirates a $4000 program he would never buy, the problem is when someone pirates something they would otherwise buy which I assure you happens a lot.

>I don't see how increasing supply in general is relevant. If I seed some flowers I'm increasing the supply of flowers, but few people would see that as a negative thing. If there were no copyright, like in (to some extent) fashion or cooking, copying would be part of reality and there would be little point to compare it to copying currency.

You can't form a business around products with unlimited supply because those products are worthless. Cooking and fashion are supply limited products. Companies use brand names, trade secrecy and manufacturing techniques that require enormous capital to protect and restrict supply. Physical limits like finite materials time, and effort also serve to restrict supply. Such is the nature of physical products, and it is because of this limit in supply that a business can be formed around it. If there was a physical product with virtually unlimited supply it would be fundamentally impossible to form a business around it.

Is there a physical product in this world that has almost unlimited supply? Yes. Air. How many business are formed around selling air? Almost none. Although, I know of one such business in canada that sells bottled clean air to people living in polluted cities in china. The only reason why this business can exist is because china has a "restricted" supply of clean air.

Information unlike physical products is not supply limited. We can copy information at a drop of a dime. Without laws, DRM or artificial supply restrictions programmed into the product itself; music, software and movies would be as worthless as the air you breath. And I said before you can't form a business around something with unlimited supply.

Come on, every human observation of reality is a macro observation of billions of atoms interacting with each other. We don't need to dive into chaos theory to observe that there are singular macro results arising from the chaotic effects of zillions of atoms interacting with one another. We build planes and cars out of the macro phenomena of billions of atoms. Economically speaking, Macro effects are evident for this: When you print money you inflate the economy, it's a pretty fundamental concept.

>You've never seen Adobe or Microsoft? Students pirate the software and then businesses have to buy it because it's what the graduates know how to use. Network effects. Mindshare. Economies of scale. Developers developers developers. Support contracts. The first hit is free.

That's called free trials in which the product is rendered useless once the trial period is up. It's taken back so the supply was only increased temporarily. It's more like a loan then QE.

>I see what you're misunderstanding. Lowering interest rates is the same thing as printing money. In order to cause interest rates to go down, The Fed has to put money into the economy. QE is what they call it when the federal funds rate is effectively zero but they still want to add more money to the economy, so they have to pour it in from a different spigot. It's fundamentally the same thing as lowering interest rates, people just notice it more because they don't do it as often.

You're the one misunderstanding. Dude printing money is different from loaning money. QE is rare because printing money is bad. Lowering interest rates is the primary method for jump starting the economy when there is a recession anyone who knows what they're talking about knows this. This is off topic anyway, but it's evident to me that you lack certain knowledge about the banking system.

>The law of supply and demand is broken in monopoly markets. The price is whatever the monopoly says it is. The Fed sets the interest rate.

You're digressing off topic. Either way this statement makes no sense. Monopolies control price because they control supply. The law of supply and demand is NEVER broken. What does the Fed have to do with this? Nothing.

>The law of supply and demand is broken in monopoly markets. The price is whatever the monopoly says it is. The Fed sets the interest rate. But the real reason the analogy fails is that counterfeiting currency creates no value, so when you exchange counterfeit currency for something of value, the thing you take away from the seller has value and the thing you give does not. It has cost society something to give you that thing. The thing you're "stealing" when you counterfeit currency isn't the money, it's what the money buys. (This is perhaps easier to understand when you forge a gift certificate rather than currency.) But when you make a copy of information, "he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me." You aren't taking anything away from society, you're only gaining something for yourself. It's the difference between stealing a loaf of bread and causing the baker to lose a potential sale because you bake your own bread using his recipe.

Cash is a medium for bartering. It's an intermediary instrument. Selling a banana for $1 then using that $1 to buy an apple is roughly the same trading that banana for an apple. The same concept applies to copying information and counterfeiting money. If I copy a music track then sell it for $1 then use that dollar to buy an apple it's equivalent to counterfeiting a dollar to buy an apple. Superficially speaking copying software seems like it doesn't harm anyone just like how printing money "seems" like it doesn't hurt anyone.

Heck imagine this ludicrous example: if I give a counterfeit dollar to the baker for some bread he wasn't "hurt" because he can spend that counterfeit dollar on something else and that "someone else" can also spend the counterfeit dollar... and so on and so on... the chain can continue so no one is hurt! Obviously, this is not the case and it's the same thing when you copy information. It only seems like no one was hurt.

>The whole deal with the baker is clearly irrelevant in that case because that transaction is real currency for real goods. The people most clearly being shafted are the customers because they're paying money for pirated goods (which they presumably think are legitimate). And then the software vendor is being shafted to the extent that any of those customers would otherwise have paid for the real version.

Dude the baker was your example, it came from you, you can't just call it irrelevant because it contradicts your statements. The main point is, someone gets shafted when you copy software, you said it yourself and I quote: "The people most clearly being shafted are the customers because they're paying money for pirated goods (which they presumably think are legitimate). And then the software vendor is being shafted to the extent that any of those customers would otherwise have paid for the real version."

>Theft is something people viscerally understand. Copyright infringement can be meaningfully distinguished from that thing. Cloning a thing is not the same as taking it. It's easy to fall into some meaningless etymological argument where nobody is right because words only mean what people understand them to mean. But if you're trying to have a discussion about copyright, calling it theft clouds the issue when the discussion inevitably turns to the characteristics of copyright that distinguish it from physical goods.

I have no intention of making this an etymological argument. I use physical examples in reality to illustrate contradictions. By your statement cloning money is not a form of theft? Fine. Lets call cloning money what the government calls it: a crime. I can clone software, music and sell it for money. According to you, doing this however is not a crime, which is categorically wrong.

I also do not really care for the super-long copyright terms, and my posts here should not be confused as a defense of the likes of Disney, etc. Most software is obsolete within a year. The unauthorized copying of newly-released software is my primary issue, having been directly affected by it for so long.

The demand for air is much, much smaller than the supply, so by your logic it should have very little value. Yet it has a huge value and no cost. Now you see why I'm saying that market forces influence only the cost and not the value?

The only point I'd make is that the copyright industry hasn't claimed "every copy is a lost sale", they've claimed that some copies are lost sales. Often, the question is whether the "main purpose" of a technology is for illegal purposes, and if the answer was yes, it wouldn't be allowed, even if there were legitimate uses.

Regardless, "the analogy breaks down here, therefore the analogy isn't valid anywhere" is not a valid argument. To the extent the parody is doing that, it's wrong.