"Piracy" Should be Legal

Pro conceded my argument that the debate should be evaluated on net benefits. In order to win on this criterion, they must prove that the world will be better off if piracy is made legal than if it remains illegal. Pro's first contention "Creative works are an abstract existence akin to property" does not link to this criterion, because there is no way that the children of authors will be any worse off having their inherited copyrights taken away seventy years after the death of the author than they would have been had it not happened at all. Pro did not declare any actual harm that occurs in the real world as a result of this copyright being canceled. Proving whether or not intellectual property is actually "property" does not do anything to address the concrete issues of job loss and economic harm caused by piracy, which will be worse if piracy is legal, since it would become more common. My arguments about job loss created by piracy were not just provided by the RIAA. It comes from a professional scientific study conducted by the Institute for Policy Innovation that was cited by the RIAA (1). This study acknowledges that only a fraction of pirated downloads are actually lost sales, but it still concludes that piracy costs tens of thousands of jobs. The study only assumes that 20% of pirated songs would have been purchased legitimately if piracy did not exist, so Pro's claim that the data is founded on pure imagination is inaccurate. Pro concedes that piracy is a contributing factor to the decrease in revenue. Since Pro and I are both agreed that financial reward increases the quality of culture produced, and Pro has conceded that piracy reduced revenues in the music industry, even if the publishing industry doesn't totally collapse, there will be some instances of authors who will be less financially motivated and create less high-quality work. Even if copyright still exists but piracy is legal (which I now acknowledge is what Pro is arguing for), there will still be more piracy because some people are dissuaded from it by piracy laws. As for Cory Doctorow, his increased sales due to free sharing of his books happen because he has differentiated his product by making it legal to share. By doing this, he appeals to people who believe in freedom of information, and to people who want to share the work freely with others. If everyone had to release their work under the same license, there would be no competitive advantage gained by sharing your book. If all authors would make more money by allowing their books to be shared, they would be doing so already because we live in a market economy that rewards and encourages economically efficient decisions. Cory Doctorow is a special case that would not apply to all writers if they had to allow sharing. In the status quo writers have the option to allow their works to be shared and if it is truly is advantageous economically we will be seeing more and more exercise that option voluntarily. Also, Pro is saying that authors who explicitly allow sharing would fall into economic ruin if my statement was true. I am not just talking about established authors. I am also talking about lawyers, professors, accountants, and other people who consider quitting their stable jobs to become full-time writers. In order for the transition to a career in writing to be worth the risk for them, they must have a high expectation of reward in order to justify it. If piracy is legal, there will be fewer sales of novels, particularly e-book sales which are a growing part of the book industry. This means that new authors will make less money, and as aspiring writers become aware of this, they will be less motivated to write new novels, and the potential author of the next Harry Potter or Game of Thrones will keep his ideas to himself and work in an office instead. Even if my arguments about how legal piracy would hurt book sales do not turn out to be true, authors will believe it to be true and will be less motivated to work hard on their potential novels. On the last contention, Pro conceded that most copyright holders would not wish to abusively exercise their rights to prevent piracy that does not cause them any harm. Because such an abuse of copyright is highly improbable, it is not significant or enough to outweigh the loss of jobs and money that would be caused by additional piracy. They also concede that "harm" is subjective and dependent on the situation of the copyright holder, so there could very well be situations in which the copyright holder is justified in exercising copyright to prevent non-financial harm to him/herself. On the conclusion, I acknowledge that I should have been talking about a world where non-commercial reproduction and distribution is legal, not a world with no intellectual property laws. But my contentions were based on the negative impacts of increased non-commercial reproduction, and my arguments still stand under the criteria initially proposed by Pro. Because there will be more piracy in a world where Pro's advocacy is accepted, the exclusion of intellectual property laws other than non-commercial sharing does not substantially weaken my argument. As for claiming that the RIAA's methodology is fundamentally flawed, I have shown that it does not rely on the faulty premise that every pirated case is a lost sale. Saying that the data is wrong just because it comes from the RIAA is an example of the Genetic Fallacy - claiming that a conclusion is wrong only because of some attribute of the source cited. The RIAA claiming something is true does not make it false. 1. http://www.ipi.org...