[earbitscom]

Simple paid options may be the best option for all involved, but again, if someone makes their product difficult or expensive to get, nothing says every person ought to still be entitled to have it however they can get at it. Saying that you can't stop this behavior completely is irrelevant to whether you should aim to reduce it. None of the laws we have made something go away completely just by it being illegal.

[nickgeiger]

Great point, making something illegal doesn't stop it, but it just raises the price. Drugs come to mind as I read this. It becomes a problem to me when making something illegal raises the cost to society overall versus actually solving whatever problem it claimed to solve. Again, drugs is a great example because we have great costs as a society for law enforcement and prisons dedicated to making drugs illegal versus quite possibly less costs if at least some drugs were legal.

To tie this back to the issue, I think SOPA taxes the Google's, Facebook's, etc of the world in an attempt to deal with piracy, which will only increase our costs as citizens for those services and not really solve the problem. Similarly, we also pay taxes to imprison drug offenders whilst drugs continue to be consumed at will.

[earbitscom]

Making something illegal that people want to pay for raises the price higher and we probably shouldn't do that. Enforcing laws that prevent people from taking things without paying for them also carries expense, but so does enforcing any laws. Just because the war on drugs is dumb doesn't make paying to enforce other regulations poor economic policy.

[nickgeiger]

Agreed. We should enforce laws and we shouldn't make laws where the cost of enforcement outweighs the benefit to society of having those laws.

[earbitscom]

Sure, except that the price tag one person assigns to the art and culture we lose out on when people cannot stand to profit from it is different than another's.

[bad_user]

When an illegal activity doesn't stop, maybe the laws and the business models are inherently broken.

Maybe "sharing" is a basic human need, just like doing sex. Maybe making "sharing" illegal is exactly as having to get a certificate to be allowed to have sex.

Music artists have always made good money from concerts. And they are still making much more money from concerts than from album sales. And in a time when album sales where justified by the scarcity created by the distribution model, it made sense. But now that distribution costs over the Internet are zero, the scarcity is only artificial.

The music industry also considered tapes and CDs to be the plague that will destroy their industry because anyone could make copies. But then they embraced these storage mediums and made even more profit. So what the fuck?

[Natsu]

Although it may be leased out for rather long periods of time life+70 years, the general public has a legal entitlement to the work under copyright law.