Thank you for making this point so vividly. Nothing is more infuriating that attempting to discuss ethics with people who are congenitally dishonest in their choice of language. It's like trying to discuss good-grooming with a person who's got a stained shirt, dirt under their fingernails, and an open fly. Instant credibility killer.

I think the real problem is that folks arguing form this position really don't want to admit that tangible goods and intangible goods are very different things, that they both demand their own governing codes, and (critically) these codes have very little overlap, either conceptually or practically.

Ultimately, this whole "duplication is theft" comes across as a giant land-grab. Thanks to technological developments, we've seen explosive growth in the realm of intangible goods. The folks in the IP business (who did next to nothing in creating this new state) would like us to ignore the fact that the laws governing IP were written before the internet existed. And they'd like us to pretend that those laws would be exactly the same had they been written after the emergence of the internet. Accordingly, we should just transpose our legal code from one sphere to another, and expect everything to work perfectly.

Never mind that the application of this law in the new sphere leads to instant conflicts with the underlying authority on which the initial law was based. Ignore, too, the fact that enforcement, to be effective, must involve surveillance with an absolutely nauseating ubiquity (itself a clearly illegal proposition). And pretend - for a moment - that this is really incidental regulation, not something that has a determining role in the fundamental architecture of the internet.

In short, pretend that's it's possible to discover fire, but legislate away some of the heat.

But there's more to it than not wanting to see a new code that's not as favorable to distributers as the old code. What folks making the "copyright is theft" argument would also like us to ignore is the degree to which our political system has been captured and undermined by private lobbies - a very nasty development that is presently generating a larger crisis of legitimacy that threatens everything Congress touches - including the old code.

Having already spent millions to (legally) bribe congresspeople, the folks saying "theft!" know they are deeply, deeply wrong. They know they represent a corrupting influence in America life. They know that they depend on a set of rules that have become odious. And they want - desperately - to avoid any clear conversation about this. Ergo, you see the constant effort to confuse the meaning of words, to ignore the actual scope and wording of the law, and - above all - to avoid any reckoning with the fundamental premise that allows the issuance of copyrights in the first place.

Well, they're not the only ones who can set the rules of engagement. And I think the first rule that honest people should insist on is the accurate and precise use of language.

I realize that this small bit of honesty is, itself, a threat to those who would use "theft" to describe unauthorized duplication. The fact that they're willing to fiercely defend their tendency to abuse semantics should signal just how thin the ice under them really is. I mean, if you can't have a conversation without warping the meaning of the words you use, is it because you don't actually have anything to say? Or are you worried that the whole edifice you've built is so fragile that the slightest crack will cause the entire thing to implode?

Here's a bit of advice: stop worrying. It's already too late. The old order has already failed. What we're living in now is an Interregnum - the period of limbo that exists between the end of one system, and the point where a new system is strong enough to sweep away the remaining dregs. I'll be the first to agree that this is a very difficult time for artists caught in the crossfire. I mean, the old system can no longer protect them, while the new system cannot yet provide for them. It's awful. But that's reality. All anyone can hope to do is hold on long enough to ride out the disruption stemming from what is, by any measure, a tremendous historical development.

So onward through the fog.