I watched some really lousy movie the other day while doing the treadmill (without the sound on, of course) and, as I went through my boring routine, the movie ended and the credits scrolled through for what seemed like an interminable period. As I did so, it struck me what a very large number of people are involved in the production of a movie. Not just actors, not just the director, but literally thousands of people who contribute in one way or the other to the effort and (I assume) all get paid something for their contributions. One or the other of them, or perhaps most, may be getting taken advantage of by the studio that produced the thing, but they are all making some aspect of their living in being part of the process. What would happen to these people, then, if copyright were abolished and the studio incurring the expense of that production could no longer claim exclusive rights to the creative product on the grounds that there is a no-cost distribution system intact for generating as many digital copies of that product as anyone cares to make? Well, the studio could no longer use the traditional model for producing such movies because it could not "own" the resulting product. The result: any consumer could download the product without having to pay anything for it; any person could freely distribute the product for free or for a charge, as circumstances permitted, without any obligation whatever to the originating studio; any person could take the characters in that production and use them freely in any independent production without obligation to the originating studio. What is more, the studio itself could take the latest blockbuster novel and could create a movie about it without any obligation to the author. And any other author could take the conceptions of the original author and borrow them freely to create derivative characters based on the originals without obligation to the original author. And so on and so on. One can argue, of course, that all this would lead to a better society but no one can deny that it would radically change the way creative works are produced and financed. Perhaps we would see a renaissance of creativity once everything is open to be instantly shared. Perhaps we would see the opposite. One thing is sure: that large group of people whose names scrolled by on the credits would no longer be able to be paid for their work on movie productions as we have known them.

PG essentially answers, "it depends" to the question whether producers should be able to charge for content but seems to argue that the existence of no-cost distribution mechanisms is a strong factor tilting the argument toward the "possibly no" direction.

I would say that the no-cost distribution mechanism is only one factor and perhaps not even among the most important.

Protecting creative effort is to me the most important factor favoring continued copyright protection (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3479959 for my elaboration of this theme). And this is no small point. There are literally countless scenarios apart from movie studio production where people invest creative effort into a product that is protected by copyright. My wife recently attended a conference teaching the "Gottman method" for marriage/family therapists. She received a thick workbook explaining the techniques used by the originators of that method. That material took years to develop. Yet, without copyright, my wife could take the materials, reproduce them as much as she likes, sell them for her own profit, and even modify them as she likes and distribute them as her own, all without obligation to the creators of that material. Should the law be, no, she can't do that because she received hard copies only of the materials but, had the creators distributed the materials digitally, then she could? That would be the result if the only relevant factor were the ease of distribution. But of course it is not. Nor do I think PG is arguing that it is. Insofar as his argument might be interpreted that way, I think it would be wrong.

So, yes, the legal definition of property continually changes. And the ease of distribution is a relevant factor in how those definitions should be shaped. But it can and should be outweighed by other factors such as society’s stake in protecting creative effort within proper bounds (i.e., for limited times and in limited ways). Our copyright laws suck today because they were largely fashioned in 1976, well before the mass digital age. They urgently need updating. They do not need updating in the SOPA manner, with the use of oppressive and overreaching legal remedies that would in their own way be "warping society" in order to achieve enforcement goals. They need to be updated in a way that strikes a balance between protecting creative effort and not having the heavy hand of the law fall on relatively trivial transgressions. This seems to be what PG is arguing. I would only take issue with placing an over-emphasis on limiting or abrogating the protections based on the distribution mechanism.