If everyone freely creates copies of what I produce, because they can, I can’t go buy things that can’t be easily replicated, like food or shelter.
If IP is free for everyone, what do we do with all the people who need to live solely by producing IP?
In fact, a lot of masterpieces we have from that period would have been illegal under current IP law because they were the result of a lot of iteration on the same concepts by different artists.
Additionally, we must keep in mind in those debates that piracy causing loss of revenue has never been proven and is an urban legend.
There’s also a moral component to all this.
Regardless of the calculus, if a creator says they don’t want to give their product away for free, that they’d like to be paid for every copy, we should respect that.
No that's not, that's an urban legend, feel free to point me to some aggregated research studies proving this, the copyright lobbies never managed to prove that during multiple decades.
Repeating something over and over again on TV by paid lobbyist doesn't make it true, you have to prove it.
> Regardless of the calculus, if a creator says they don’t want to give their product away for free, that they’d like to be paid for every copy, we should respect that.
That's debatable at best.
That’s just how the math works out. Same as any other form of theft.
Then in economics, free is different from any other price (even 1 cent), they have different behaviour and cannot be used interchangeably as demonstrated again and again during research. So no, your example is wrong, those people wouldn't have bought the song anyway and the total revenue from those people would be zero.
As a result, your argumentation is flawed. The 1000 "pirated" copies were never copies that you had. Even in a world where you could magically prevent all sharing of information you would not have that many more copies sold.
Mislabeling (lying) is not a good way to start an argument.