[mindslight]

Actually no, what I'm saying is that what I choose to say to a friend should not be subject to a third party that demands to listen in. If my friend betrays my trust and shares the contents of that communication, then I can't do much about that.

You're right that I've described a tradeoff and simply assumed the case is closed - I mean, where does this right to privacy come from even? And to me, the answer that settles that question is physics - as long as one-way functions exist, then so does encryption (and it's generally believed that one-way functions exist). So preventing this privacy means restricting general communication, and we all know how that works out.

(PS. It's easier to have an honest debate when you don't knock down straw men with dismissive snide marks like 'Hilarious!'. You might even end up understanding a different point of view - and don't worry, that does not mean you need to agree with it.)

[throwawaykf05]

> Actually no, what I'm saying is that what I choose to say to a friend should not be subject to a third party that demands to listen in.

So when you're "saying something" to a friend that is gigabytes of an exact copy of a movie that somebody else created, why should you be the only one having complete control over it? Trust me, the "third party" has no interest in listening in to what you have to say if you are "saying" stuff that is of no interest to them. But when you intermingle "somebody else's" information with "your" own, obviously that somebody else will feel entitled to, at the least, "listen in".

> And to me, the answer that settles that question is physics ...

Not sure what the point is, but note that all the encryption in the world (allegedly) didn't keep your information out of the NSA's fingers. All the NSA-rage that gets poured on HN on a daily basis, and nobody realizes that they've been doing the same to the music, movie and game industries since the dawn of computers?

> (PS. It's easier to have an honest debate when you don't knock down straw men with dismissive snide marks like 'Hilarious!'. You might even end up understanding a different point of view - and don't worry, that does not mean you need to agree with it.)

It's not a strawman, you just missed my point: It's always amusing that the same people who are so strongly pro-privacy -- essentially your right to control information that you deem to be your own -- are also so dismissive about others' rights to control what they deem to be their information. The irony is overwhelming.

[chipotle_coyote]

While people keep knocking you down for trolling, I think that's actually a really good point.

I don't equate "piracy" to theft (or piracy, for that matter), but I think we're culturally trapped in a very curious mindset. I don't think anyone would argue that the value in a movie or television show or book or any other creative work lies solely in the cost to reproduce a copy -- if anything, we'd be more likely to argue that the cost to reproduce it is incidental to its value. To me, the logical outcome of that is that we should pay for copies of creative materials regardless of the marginal cost because that's never really been what we were paying for in the first place -- and it seems perfectly reasonable to me that, thus, we should honor the wishes of the creators when it comes to price (or the people the creators have ostensibly delegated that responsibility to, i.e., publishers and distributors). But instead we're often arguing that if the cost to copy is effectively zero, the creators and publishers are unreasonable authoritarian police state thugs for saying, "Hey, the cost of the copy isn't where the value lies, and if you're going to enjoy our work you should still pay us."

And, yes, I know all the arguments about publishers (and creators) making unreasonable demands, but I think that makes the line even murkier, not clearer. We don't say "the price you're asking for this physical object is unreasonable, so I'm just taking it without paying for it at all"; why do we think it's fair to say "the price you're asking for this digital object is unreasonable, so I'm making a copy without paying for it?" Yes, the cost to do so is zero, but the value isn't derived from the reproduction cost.