Since were going with the "songs and music and anything digital are just bits...".

What about identity theft? It's just words on a piece of paper representing you as a person. Should we say the same thing when someone "steals" (just like with digital items, nothing is actually stolen) your identity?

What about your bank account? In most banks it's just numbers representing money...but it's just 'bits'..right?

Currency is also just ink and paper. Like digital goods, it's only as valuable as what people are willing to pay. Why should I be put in jail for copying ink that is on a piece of paper?

"IP is just a way for established players to be lazy and avoid finding business models that acknowledge reality. Unfortunately, their laziness and greed also cost us civil liberties since freedom to copy a string of bits is indistinguishable from free speech."

You want to talk about greed? The greedy people are the ones that download music and movies for free and devalue the work of people that put hundreds and thousands of hours to make it.

If something tangible is stolen as a result of copying, that is an issue of fraud, not IP. 'Potential profits' are not tangible.

The people who put hundreds and thousands of hours into making content aren't the ones who benefit from IP laws. It's the big cartel-ish companies with a zillion lawyers and friends in government who own rights to the IP and pay artists small royalties that rake in all the cash. IP is not necessary for artists and content-producers to make money. This should be fairly obvious by now after the success of the Grateful Dead, the rise of the indie recording industry, free and open source software, etc.

I'm not necessarily arguing that copying content isn't a skeevy thing to do in some circumstances. It's definitely a lot more noble to support an artist. But IP laws inject the state's jurisdiction deep into our private lives, and the result is things like continent-sized firewalls and searching of laptops at borders. In this case the solution to the problem is much, much worse than the problem itself. It doesn't even have to be a problem at all--a smart producer can use copying as an advantage.

"The people who put hundreds and thousands of hours into making content aren't the ones who benefit from IP laws. It's the big cartel-ish companies with a zillion lawyers and friends in government who own rights to the IP and pay artists small royalties that rake in all the cash."

hmm..so who gives the big cartels the rights to their music? that's right...the artists. If the artists are getting scraps and you are illegally copying their stuff and as a result, they lose contracts, it's hurting them in the process.

Copyright infringement is not theft, it's closer to counterfeiting. If it's not stopped, the value will eventually be $0 because people will not be willing to pay for it. see: music, newspapers, books, and eventually movies. Its happening to anything that can be digitized.

"IP is not necessary for artists and content-producers to make money. This should be fairly obvious by now after the success of the Grateful Dead, the rise of the indie recording industry, free and open source software, etc."

Free and open source software is a bad example. OSS uses copyright law to protect it from being used in proprietary software. With no IP laws, most big companies would either create very expensive software (so anyone that buys it would not be willing to share it) or they would all go to service based apps (this is already starting to happen).

The grateful dead has had a following for many decades. What about new artists that want to make a living? Bar gigs don't pay anything, so the only real way to make a living is to sign with a recording company. In some ways, sharing music forces artists to go with a recording company, because they don't have a chance at making a living any other way.

After 10 years of popularized piracy (I know it's been available for much longer than this, but Napster mainstreamed it), the youth of today feels entitled to free things on the Internet and are becoming less and less likely to pay for digital media.

This is the danger of piracy and why all of those industries wanted to stop it.

"It doesn't even have to be a problem at all--a smart producer can use copying as an advantage."

I no longer make applications, only services. So the direct result of piracy is that people that normally would have to pay a one-time fee for my software now have to pay me every month.

"hmm..so who gives the big cartels the rights to their music? that's right...the artists. If the artists are getting scraps and you are illegally copying their stuff and as a result, they lose contracts, it's hurting them in the process."

More artists go with indie studios every year, and for the most part these studios have learned to use copying to their advantage instead of fighting it.

There's never been any definitive research that shows artists lose money from copying, even the big studio artists. The math isn't simple--even if you grant that fewer albums are purchased due to copying, a wider fan base could lead to higher concert and merchandise sales. Of course, this may also mean that copying can increase album sales if it boosts popularity enough through network effect. One copier who likes an album may tell 10 of his friends, 2 of whom buy the album; that is profit directly attributable to copying.

"With no IP laws, most big companies would either create very expensive software (so anyone that buys it would not be willing to share it) or they would all go to service based apps (this is already starting to happen)."

If this is really how it would play out, I don't see the problem. If copying bits makes shrink wrapped software untenable (which I question), then so be it. Business models change all the time. It's not the end of the world.

"The grateful dead has had a following for many decades. What about new artists that want to make a living?"

The Grateful Dead started small like any band. One of the factors that led to their explosive growth was letting people freely distribute recordings of their live shows.

"After 10 years of popularized piracy (I know it's been available for much longer than this, but Napster mainstreamed it), the youth of today feels entitled to free things on the Internet and are becoming less and less likely to pay for digital media."

I see it more as people feeling entitled to communicate and share with each other freely, which is a good thing. I hope the trend continues.

"I no longer make applications, only services. So the direct result of piracy is that people that normally would have to pay a one-time fee for my software now have to pay me every month."

So? You adapted to the circumstances and are still providing the world value and getting paid for it. What's the problem?

I find it odd that you would think piracy was popularized 10 years ago. First off, commercially pirated publication has been popular ever since publication was invented. Pirate editions of books have been widely available for hundreds of years.

Individual copying of music has been popular since home taping became available from the early 60's on. My friends and I had lots of home recorded compact cassettes in the 80s. The youth of that day felt perfectly entitled to tape whatever they wanted. The coming of CD's meant that the first generation tape was perfect with no additional hiss.

Digital copying became popular as soon as home CD-R came along. I remember being amazed when $1.50 blank CD-Rs and $500 burners came along in the mid 90s. I soon had a pile of bit for bit perfect copies. No generational loss, nothing missing but the cover art.

Even if the internet or peer-to-peer had never come into use, there would today be a huge casual piracy scene based on MP3s, FLACs, portable hard drives and burned discs. If the publishing industry somehow manages to stuff the P2P genie back in the bottle, that's where we'll end up.

> What about your bank account? In most banks it's just numbers representing money...but it's just 'bits'..right?

You're suggesting that people should rely on copyright to keep their bank from stealing their money, rather than an actual contract with the bank?

By that argument propagation of child pornography (at least in digital form) should be legal since it is just bits--copying child porn bits is indistinguishable from free speech.

Your argument fails, of course, because it is NOT indistinguishable. These same issues arose with pre-digital media. After all, you could say all print media is just blobs of ink on paper, and and freedom to copy print media is indistinguishable from free speech. Yet we manage to distinguish just find. The same works just fine for information in bit string form.

Child porn falls into 'reasonable limit on free speech' category because kids are harmed in the making of it. Has nothing to do with IP.

I think non-digital IP is a bad idea as well and serves established publishers, not content producers. Trying to pass off someone's work as your own is already frowned upon socially. There's no need to make it a legal issue. It's sad that we as a society feel that we need the state to referee every single transaction. If you are able to produce something of value, you can find a way to profit from it whether others can copy it or not. If a lot of people want to copy your work, that is actually a good sign and gives you more opportunity for profit. You just have to be a bit more creative than the RIAA.

But if you go down the road of leaving it up to suppliers to secure against copying, you end up with ridiculous DRM systems.

Would you rather receive an un-DRM'ed mp3 in exchange for the promise that you won't make copies of it for everyone else, or receive a DRM'ed file that you are free to try and circumvent? Particularly for less tech-savvy people I think the unDRMed option is better.

(the third option is an unDRMed mp3 that we can legally copy and give to our friends, which you can have already as long as you stay away from the major record labels, but I don't see why the big industry players shouldn't be allowed to continue to use IP laws - no-one is forcing you to listen to their music/play their games/watch their movies).

If the state is left out of it, the market will select against crappy DRM systems and either the whole concept will go away, or producers will find a non-crappy way to implement DRM.

No one is forcing me to watch their movies, but laws that get passed stop me from copying a string of bits when absolutely no harm is done to the producer if I do so. This basically presumes that everything I say or do should be monitored by the state, since I could be breaking IP laws in the process. How about instead, the law protects actual property from actual theft, meaning something has only been 'stolen' from you if you don't have it anymore, and industries that create easily copied content get with the 21st century and stop bitching.

> How about instead... industries that create easily copied content get with the 21st century and stop bitching.

I like the ideal of what you're saying, but I worry about the practicality of it. I don't see how you could finance a huge blockbuster movie without having some guarantee that you would have exclusive rights to exploit that content for some limited period (which is effectively what copyright is about).

Sure, the harm to the producer isn't measurable if you download a movie from the internet. But I don't think that would scale to the wider population - if downloading for free became the standard way of getting movies, how would they recoup the production costs (I guess if you can answer that question then you could become very wealthy!).

Maybe there's some painful expectation realignment due from those whose salaries are paid by making movies (I don't think we'd be short of good actors if they were paid thousands instead of millions per movie). Could they produce the same quality of movie at a massively lower cost? Another question that if you could answer you could make yourself a lot of money.

I don't feel like any of those things are problems. If it really isn't possible to make a profit making blockbuster movies without invasive liberty-destroying laws, then so be it. There are lots of potentially great things that just aren't profitable to produce in practice. Why are movies so special? That said, there would still be huge demand without IP--I think people could figure something out.

I'm pretty much in your corner--I think copyrights and patents have been extended and abused and need major reform. But let me play devil's advocate for a moment.

It sounds like you are happy to sacrifice Hollywood movies. Fine. But there are so many other creative activities that do require some form of copyright or patent protection and enforcement in order to generate revenue. Do you really think we would still have professional studio musicians and recording engineers, journalists, fiction writers, critics, copy editors, if all copying were legal? Do you want to ditch all of that and be left with only amateur work? Or maybe we can have extensive product placement in all creative works, so there's some revenue source.

Linux and Wikipedia are amazing but I don't think their model applies to everything.