"Piracy" Should be Legal

When the Institute for Policy Innovation says that 20% of illegally downloaded songs would have been purchased legally, that is not an arbitrary figure. It is backed by scientific evidence. In their own words, "A number of academic studies have attempted to estimate the impact that file sharing has had on sound recording sales. The specific estimate of 20% is taken from Pietz, M. and Waelbroeck, P., The Effect of Internet Piracy on Music Sales: Cross Section Evidence , Review of Economic Research on Copyright Issues, 2004, vol. 1(2), pp 78." (1) The Institute for Policy Innovation does use scientific and statistical methods to calculate their figures, and Pro has not provided any scientific studies that show piracy has no negative effect on the economy. All that Pro has done is attempt to cast doubt on the credibility and methodology of the source, and has provided no evidence that piracy has no effect on job loss. Therefore, we can conclude that the study is likely to be true, and that an increase in piracy would result in more job loss. In Round 3, Pro agrees with my statement that Cory Doctorow is a special case, and that his increased profits from allowing his books to be freely shared are in fact a result of how being one of the few free-sharing authors enables him to differentiate his product. Extend my argumentation about how Doctorow's success is not applicable to authors in general. The example of Doctorow does not disprove any of my claims about how most authors would make less money if piracy was legal. Their analogy about XKCD is not relevant or comparable to the topic of how Doctorow is a special case. Pro conceded all of my reasons why there would be less creation of culture for commercial reasons and fewer new artists in a world where piracy is legal, and countered with a claim that there would be less creation of derivative works, AKA "fanfiction". So on the issue of culture, this debate will come down to weighing my claims of lost commercially produced culture and Pro's claims of less fanfiction. Pro claims that derivative works are banned, but the reality is that the overwhelming majority of intellectual property holders allow fanfiction to be published based on their works. Also fanfiction usually tends to be of far lower quality than professionally produced work, as anyone who has read fanfiction would agree. Because we live in a world saturated with far more media than we will ever consume, we should value quality over quantity. However, Pro's claims about derivative works are not relevant to this debate, as Pro admitted herself. Yet my claims that sharing would reduce the financial motivation of authors still stand uncontested. A world where piracy is legal is a world with less culture. On the issue of non-commercial works: Just because a work was created without the purpose of commercial gain does not mean it was created without a purpose. Something that thwarts that purpose may very well be real harm to the author. An example would be loss of reputation. If a creative work is shared on a controversial website or one that has dubious reputability, it could hurt the author's reputation, since many people do hold others guilty by association. Friedrich Nietzsche has had his reputation greatly harmed just because his ideas were associated with the Nazis, and many others have also suffered from guilt by association. If someone is trying to improve his reputation by creating works of high quality, having those works appropriated and republished by extremists and conspiracy theorists may very well counteract any improvements to the author's reputation gained by writing them. Pro claims that we live in a world "in which sharing is illegal, a world in which 70% of citizens are criminals, and in which merely sharing a copy of a book with a friend can lead to massive and impossible fines." However the vast majority of people who commit piracy do not get punished for it. Most people punished for piracy are those who engage in very large amounts of piracy, such as the founders of the Pirate Bay. Many of Pro's arguments ignore the fact that piracy laws are not enforced against most people who commit piracy. Let us compare the real world as it right now against Pro's world where "sharing is legal, a world in which people aren't charged for merely sharing a book, and as a consequence, media companies as well as new artists have to focus on a new business model for an equally new technological age of information", as Pro said. In such a world, businesses would have to take on the costs and risks of investing in a new business model. Because business would be less predictable risks would go up, and they would invest less money into intellectual property, because that is what businesses do when risk is higher than reward. This links to my arguments about job loss and loss of culture. The 71,000 jobs lost are only in the sound recording industry. The actual job loss from piracy in all industries would be much higher, and since piracy would drastically increase in Pro's world (which they conceded), this would result in the loss of tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of jobs that would still exist in a world with piracy laws. This loss of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars, along with a large amount of creative works that will not exist without the financial motivation to create them, outweighs Pro's claims of injustice. This is why you should vote Con in this debate. 1. http://www.ipi.org...