> And if I decided to show one of them to a someone who gave me money in return, that still doesn't give anybody who didn't pay me or anyone else for that matter, any right to access that file, no matter how little "intrinsic value" it represents.

Sure, this is unconditionally right if we go by the book and agree with the law. No argument here. Though, by going by the said law... The full albums, songs, movies, movie clips, whatever unauthorized there is in YouTube for example for billions of people to see every day creates a huge problem.

For example here in Finland, any person listening to an unauthorized upload of an album on YouTube breaks the law. Practically a huge majority of the youth are criminals as they do this on a daily basis, and take it for granted. Obviously it is utterly senseless to go after these people for what they are doing.

> If someone invented a teleport that allowed people to beam to whereever and back, that would cause a rise in theft of tangible goods all over the world. But this would not mean that because the old systems of doors and locks were now inefficient, people should not be allowed to claim ownership of property anymore.

But this, of course, is a flawed analogy. A better one would be with an ability to clone material for free. Say, if we were able to build a car, and then clone it for free for everyone. Why wouldn't we? For many goods we could just come up with better and better ones again and again, and people would immediately clone them for themselves and be happy. Sounds good, no?

In the end the main reason I oppose the copyright mafia bullshit is the tendency to limit my ability to use computers as computers. They want to tell me which bit patterns are illegal on my mass storage device or RAM. They want to tell me what CPU instructions I am not allowed to inspect or run. They want to tell me what network data I am allowed to capture and inspect. In essence, they want to own my general purpose computer and make it some form of "special purpose machine" with certain set of bits or instructions, or pixels on the screen. Cory Doctorow gave a great talk about this subject in 28C3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg

And boy, if someone breaks these rules. Your 9-year-old daughter downloads an album on her laptop, and the police storms in after you refuse to sign NDA and pay a fine from an anti-piracy group which is 30 times higher than the value of the album in question. And I am not bullshitting you -- this really happened two years ago in Finland. See: https://torrentfreak.com/police-raid-9-year-old-pirate-bay-g...

HN submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4818159

For me personally, whether you, or someone get your living from whatever you do which people may pirate is completely irrelevant in grand scheme of things. The much larger picture is these completely messed up laws with these mafia-like anti-piarcy groups such as MPAA or RIAA, and many domestic ones in almost every country. The issue is way, way much more than just whether something is right or wrong. I see this whole issue very central on a societal level as well as from the point of view of something I'd call "computer/computing culture". I see it as something we as hackers should be very aware and vocal about. See SOPA and PIPA as examples as to why.