My frustration is that the people who don't like the old structure won't allow a new structure to monetize itself. The greatest thing that could have come about out of the shell of the music industry was a way to pay artists directly. Pirate Bay could put that system in place tomorrow if they cared to. But it hasn't happened and won't happen if people don't actually pay.

The app store and iTunes are the closest we've got to that. But it doesn't make any difference that devs are independent - people crack their stuff and seed torrents all the same.

So there is another better model that could have existed. But it is 'disappeared'.

There could also be respect for the individual's right to mind their own creation. But that is also disappeared.

Truth is the anonymous mob of the internet is another sort of unaccountable and unelected government. I wish it were different.

Any chance you could come up with more appropriate language? Or does your position weaken once you start thinking about it a bit more precisely?

If that were the case - if that unlimited copying and sharing didn't have an effect or even much of an effect - there would be no piracy problem to discuss.

But the reality is rather different. Those actions actually have huge effects.

I would much prefer a system where those huge effects are channeled into a win-win system. At any level such a marketplace would be preferable to denying that such effects even exist.

Only by removing the context (idiotic, given that the context was immediately available to any reader) could you establish an equivalence between my criticism of you and my own position.

Anyone with an honest interest in these debates knows that tangible goods and intangible goods are fundamentally different. More importantly, the desire to confuse this distinction is one of the favorite tactics of people on either side of the debate who wish to justify obviously self-serving behavior.

Just to reiterate, I never said that copying was meaningless. Indeed, any honest assessment would conclude that it is far from meaningless. But that doesn't mean that, in listening to files (copied with our without authorization from the copyright holder) that I am "consuming" anything in the material sense. And I maintain that you will never come to any clarity about the optimal way to handle intangible goods if you can't grasp the most characteristic properties of intangibility.

For what it's worth, I fully appreciate the economic effect of dilution. In a situation where a legal monopoly is enforceable, and some baseline measure of demand can be identified, then yes, unauthorized copying diminishes the value that could otherwise be realized by the copyright holder. At the same time, it's impossible to avoid the conclusion that this projected value exists ONLY in situations where a legalized monopoly exists. It cannot exist in situations where the impossibility of two parties maintaining full possession of the same physical object (like our sandwich) forces some sort of negotiation and trade. Indeed, copyright is an attempt to make the intangible function as though it were tangible. In that sense, it is a deliberate fiction.

Historically, this valuable fiction could be maintained when the intangible good was wedded to a tangible wrapper. But once the physical component of media became something that folks on the buy side already owned our controlled outright (i.e. disk space, bandwidth, and electricity), the fiction became unsustainable.

I'll be the first to agree that we need a new system. Unlike you, I don't think we can define it by continuing to use language and concepts that are utterly obsolete. And more importantly, I think folks having these conversations need to maintain a degree of personal integrity when having them.

Deflecting criticism through false equivalence fails that test.

In other words, unless something is a physical product it no longer has a defensible value.

So - taking your point - let’s agree that music isn’t a physical product at all. Of course, any piece of music starts it’s life as an idea anyway. Let’s consider music as a service - an entertainment service rendered by the artist onto anyone who chooses to listen. This is an ‘intellectual’ service provided much along the same lines as a lawyer or journalist or any thought-based medium. The main inputs are only the great intangibles of time and expertise.

Now, your original view invalidating the value of non-physical goods demands that any thought-based products do not deserve compensation or protection in your system. After all, there value is just ‘deliberate fiction’. The legal profession, of course, is just a ‘legalized monopoly’ complete with barriers to entry such as law school and the Bar Exam. Journalism - built on the back of intangibles of integrity, connections, and honesty - is just an ‘unsustainable fiction’.

Let’s put a bold line under it: this world-view dismisses the value of non-physical-product producing work. This sounds quite like Maoist China to me. You accuse me of peddling ‘utterly obsolete’ ideas but your line of thought is gravely far from being progressive. It is actually very retrograde and, in my opinion, anti-individual.

Work. Time. Expertise. All intangibles. Either they have value in society and deserve recompense or they don’t. It’s yes or it’s no. To avoid a long deliberation on the difference between lawyers and artists let's make it simple: if one derives something desired from the work of others than it is worthy of recompense for, logically, all that is desired has value. The inputs truly don’t matter. The medium of transference certainly doesn’t.

From where I am standing it is your thought so far that is actually the ‘deliberate fiction’: a mental construct dissolving value. A belief that through some McGuffin-like process of ‘digitalization’ the natural rules of civil society no longer apply. These are not top-down pronouncements from a single man or a government; they are bottom-up flexible norms derived from millennia of very real human experience across thousands of cultures comprised by millions of people.

That for me is the ultimate irony and hubris: to think that one’s simple fiction somehow displaces the truth of human society. I am all for transformation but the sad news for some people seems to be that the virtual world of the internet is but a derivative of the real world - not a replacement for it. If you want to build a better internet, build one that can re-purpose human interaction in a positive way. If you only want to consume the internet simply claim that that re-purposing has no basis for being done.

So which is it? I believe that artists deserve at least a period of recompense for their works. What do you believe?