Raided 9-Year-Old Pirate Bay Girl Came To Save Us All

Every single successful civilization/culture/religion in human history was based on sharing. The pirates, bribing politicians and police officers, across the western world are destroying the very fabric of our society. Plus the DRM, constant monitoring and logging of internet activity, war on open platforms, like Linux.

There hasn't really been any outrage beyond articles like this before, and there doesn't seem to be any outrage except articles like this now. The public at large doesn't seem to have a problem with any of it.

Hopefully things will turn for the better and people of the future will see our outlawing of non-commercial sharing of data as one of those stupid things the troglodytes of the 21th century did. But IP will die a slow and ugly death.

When you steal from the store you remove an item from their inventory which they cannot sell. The cost of that item that was already paid now has to be covered by profits made up from selling other items in the inventory, thus increasing (albeit very little) the price of the rest of the inventory.

In other words, the physical good is moved from one place to another, depriving the original owner of its value.

File sharing, on the other hand, has no marginal cost to each "copy" of a file. If I write a song or software and put it on the internet, it costs me nothing if 1 or one million people share the file (assuming it's not my bandwidth to pay for). Also, if one user downloads my file it does not disappear or transfer from me to them. I do not have to manufacture another item. File sharing is copying. Stealing is transfer of ownership.

So, you cannot directly compare file sharing, which has no marginal cost, to physical items that have a marginal cost of production. What owners of copyrighted works are trying to recover are their fixed costs in producing the work.

when you copy a digital "good" you don't deprive its owner from it. Therefore this is NOT stealing in any way. Not even remotely akin to stealing.

Let's get it straight a last time (I hope): if you have an apple and I take it, you haven't got it anymore. Digital goods are INFORMATION. When you give me an information YOU STILL F*CKING HAVE IT. By your twisted way of thinking, people reading headlines in papers at the store are burglars, and so are people reading the time on your watch without asking you first. This cannot be the case. This shouldn't be the case. This won't be the case.

That's a capital investment. Putting resources into a designing and manufacturing a product before you've got anything to sell is a risky proposition, but it's how the vast majority of all economic activity takes place. Investors bear the risk that people won't be willing to pay for the finished product, and understand that there's a chance that they will lose money instead of making it.

Simply putting effort into creating and selling something doesn't entitle you to a positive return; you have to make something that customers are willing to buy, and people who make their own copies of intangible, non-rival goods are just another category of people who aren't willing to pay. Indeed, in practical terms, they're the last segment of your potential market you'd want to pursue; much better to focus on people who aren't buying your product for other reasons entirely.

> someone then has gone on out of their way and attempted to steal it.

But no one is stealing the work that was created. "Stealing" implies depriving someone of something they own, but this is impossible with respect to creative work. No one can remove the pattern of ideas that defines the work from the creator's mind.

What's happening here is that people are making their own replicas of the creator's original work. This isn't "stealing" anymore than someone is stealing your house by building their own house using a design based on yours.

Making a copy doesn't deprive the original author of anything; all it does is alter the external market conditions under which that author might seek to obtain revenue from selling copies of that original work. But he never had any right to a positive market return in the first place; his profit is inherently contingent on the willingness of others to pay him, and people who aren't willing to pay him because they made their own copies of the work are no different than people who aren't willing to pay him for any other reason, unless you assume that he already had the exclusive right to make those copies.

Do you see the paradox here? You can only posit that the creator has an inherent right to restrict others' copying if you assume that he has an inherent right to a positive ROI when marketing the work, but you can only assume an right to a positive ROI in a scenario where people making their own copies is already legally censured, because otherwise, there's no legal distinction between people who didn't pay him because they copied the work, and people who didn't pay him because they just didn't want the work at all.

So the numbers would be declining, but it's hard to know if this is specifically from file sharing, or just from an audience not engaged with a specific product. But the content investors don't know any other game, so they keep investing. It might take ten years of no big hits, no outliers before they decide the game has permanently changed.

And besides, maybe the ROI is so good that it can take a 50% cut and still be better than anything else they can easily get involved in.

When big industries peter out, it's usually not evident until hindsight has been introduced what was the point where it was no longer worth committing any capital. There is a lot of momentum pushing them along, particularly in very established demographics.

Eventually either a new way of earning cash from production will pop up, or, more likely, the returns to investors in entertainment will head back to the levels experienced by many other industries. The barriers to entry for new talent will be lower (less gatekeepers) but the overall outsized returns to a small number of individuals will probably permanently lower. Because it's hard to dominate an industry and make massive returns without structural, legislative or oligopolistic barriers to entry to competition.

Well, the rest of the entertainment industry isn't so keen on this.

I'm pretty sure you were appalled, not appealed.