[nevon]

Because it's literally impossible. If you want someone to be able to read your text or view your image, in the end the light has to reach the viewer's eyes, and that means it can be recorded. At best, DRM can be an annoyance. It can never stop unauthorized redistribution of material.

[jsymolon]

Don't Copy that Floppy.

Perfect example from the 80's, an arms race to prevent copying of software, which ended up doing what ?

Software still got copied while increasing the publishers cost.

Now 30 years later, efforts to preserve are stymied by copy protection on failing hardware. In an ironic twist, the protection broken by the pirates is salvageable.

[794CD01]

How can you expect anyone without a time machine to explain what it ended up doing?

For example, we live in a world where companies like Adobe or Autodesk can sell software licenses for thousands of dollars. Would that be true if software piracy became the norm decades ago? Would we be better off one way or the other? Who can say?

[undersuit]

What if piracy was never invented and we all just paid our dues. What a happy little libertarian utopia.

>Would that be true if software piracy became the norm decades ago?

How many decades ago? I built my first computer and installed pirate Windows and Photoshop versions back in 97. Warcraft had questions you had to answer during installation that were answers from the lore in the manual. Do you think people in the 80s with the first personal computers would see their friend use a new software and then wait 4-6 weeks for their own floppy disk to arrive in the mail?

[wyager]

Not to detract from your argument, but most libertarians support either substantially scaling back or entirely eliminating IP law, including copyright law.

Internet piracy in general seems to be culturally quite left-libertarian.

[794CD01]

They didn't anyway. But all of that is irrelevant. The point is that questions like the one I originally responded to are fundamentally unanswerable. Don't get too caught up in the specific example. It could just as easily be "maybe walking across the street on a different day causes RMS to be hit by a bus". Or Microsoft taking a different path delays the Gates foundation from eradicating polio by 30 years.