[jMyles]

If their work warranted the prices they want to charge, they wouldn't need an elaborate state apparatus to buttress their business model.

The same is true of the west Nashville music-finance complex. And of Hollywood. And of every industry rent-seeking around the restrictions on speech and press which are branded as "intellectual property".

This just happens to be a transparently egregious example, as they are literally trying to censor a FOSS project and make its contributors' speech invisible / illegal.

[bilvar]

Can you elaborate how not wanting you to pirate the games they spent tons of money and labor in making is "rent-seeking" and a restriction on free speech? It seems like a stretch.

"This just happens to be a transparently egregious example, as they are literally trying to censor a FOSS project and make its contributors' speech invisible / illegal"

Give me a break. The only reason this software was FOSS, was for the creators to receive protection from useful idiots like you. We all know that the purpose of this project was to profit from piracy.

[jMyles]

At some level, isn't the whole exercise of characterizing the copying of bytes as "piracy" just a way to justify invasive state policy?

We can observe that the nature of information is that it is free to copy. This is not a new observation; the myth of Prometheus tells us of this nature, and of the power that the gods foolishly attempt to shore up by pretending that it can't be copied.

Of course I agree that solid games are worth money, but if you have to avert your eyes to the entire evolution of the way information propagates in the universe in order to achieve that, you've gone down an incorrect path.

And yes, building entire media empires designed to leverage your right to distribute bytes as you see fit, while prohibiting others from distributing them under threat of violence, is most certainly rent-seeking.

The silly fiction that someone "owns" that information because of a previous historical event is not in keeping with any part of nature that I'm able to observe.

What makes anyone think that on sufficiently long time scales the internet will continue to abide this?

[bilvar]

Ah I see, you've created an entire ideobabble to justify free-riding, on an absurd premise as well that "We can observe that the nature of information is that it is free to copy". This is the equivalent of "We can observe that the nature of animals is to kill each other for calories, so it's morally justified to murder other people and eat them."

I'm done.

[jMyles]

...I mean, maybe there is some moral imperative toward vegetarianism. I don't see the connection with cannibalism; seems like you're just being a bit silly.

But I think we can make that decision without needing onerous and obstructive state infrastructure, so I don't think the comparison is particularly germane. Unless you are suggesting that it's the role of the state to stop animals from eating each other? (Isn't that the same impetus as suggesting it's the role of the state to stop data from replicating?)

Lastly, I think you've misunderstood the role of the free-rider problem in public goods, particularly in the application of building non-rivalrous markets; in fact, you have it exactly backwards.