I think this is actually the one (perhaps only) point where copyright infringement is actually analogous to theft. Why do we prohibit shoplifting? Because shoplifting prevents a business owner from profiting off of the thing he had intended to sell, in addition to depriving him of his investment in the inventory (of course, no business owner cares much about his inventory for its own sake, he cares about it because it represents potential profit).

As many will be eager to point out, intellectual property is not finite. But this only means that you're depriving the IP owner of less profit than you would be if it were a tangible good, not that it deprives him of none. You might just as well say, oh well the thief would never have bought that DVD anyway, and the business owner has millions of them (and insurance!), so it's not really something the law should worry about... Also see mc32's sibling comment with some other excellent examples.

Financial prospects are things like next year's record sales. "Past performance does not necessarily predict future results" and all that.

Business models exist to help predict the future. That's why their called business models and not business facts. To imprison someone because she didn't fall in line with your plans for the future is a terrible thing to do.

Contrast this with actual theft of real money. It was yours, now you don't have it. That's harming your financial interests and violating your inalienable rights to property and the freedom to use it at your own discretion.

Those are punishments.

Asking the violator to cough up the retail price of the pirated product on the other hand wouldn't be a punishment for criminal acts, it would be solving a civil dispute.

Of course making this work at scale is not something that can be done in courts. And making unilateral claims sufficient to require someone to pay up is a bad idea too.

That's why some propose a general copyright levy, or a "culture tax" that gets redistributed to producers.

Except then you have to have a great big state bureaucracy to arbitrarily allocate tax funds.

No, the correct solution is still free information - but all it takes is a change of perspective and mindset on the parts of content creators.

You have a valuable, scarce, useful asset. It is not the infinitely reproducible digital information at the end of the process that you use a legal framework to restrict distribution of. People want that, but information is no longer scarce, and to try to restrict it is unethical.

The valuable resource you have is your creativity. Your ability to produce that digital information is a scarce resource that few possess. The current model that most creators pursue is that an investor of some sort seeks to take advantage of the arbitrage the artificial implications that copyright imparts upon free markets to profit off the perpetual legal ownership of information, and pays you either a fixed salary or a fraction of the returns to actually produce the work, in exchange for the up front funding.

Kickstarter, patreon, gittip, etc are demonstrating the ability for consumers of information to also pay the scarce resource - the creation - themselves. And it would make a lot more sense for consumers to just pay for the culture they want to be made directly, and then everyone can experience it - rather than having some state institution doing it.

No, those current platforms are not appropriate to replace copyright. Of course they are not. They exist under copyright. We cannot conceive of what it would look like to have a legitimate free culture patronage service because one cannot exist right now. But I wrote this post and a bunch of others and keep debating the topic because I fundamentally have faith it would work, and that the ongoing cultural death of western civilization since the advent of perpetual copyright is much more detrimental to society than the free availability of Jersey Shore.

But everything is a "business model." If you get paid for work performed, that's a "business model". Should I be free to upset that business model? Can I talk to someone's employer and convince them to pay me 20% of someone's salary without their permission?

Rihanna shows up for an event, a promoter promised her 50,000 for showing up and singing 60 seconds of a song and signing a few autographs. Can this promoter turn around and say, sorry, I was kidding, I don't have money for you, it was just entertainment, here's your cab and airfare?

We can reduce things till they lose some of their properties and our arguments appear reasonable, but most people will disagree with that reduction, I think.

All your examples involve fraud, so they don't really apply here. If I promised to pay someone for work and didn't pay them, I deserve to lose a lawsuit and be forced to make restitution. In certain circumstances, the fraud is criminal and I deserve jail time for preying on the vulnerable or uninformed.

There may be counterexamples worth addressing, though. Can someone can come up with one? They probably involve at least the threat of tangible harm in some form. And arguably, there are already laws against those things, such as your fraud examples.

I think DRM is more analogous to leasing. I don't like DRM, there being alternatives I'd go with the unDRMed product/service. But it's up to us the consumers to say, yeah, I'll make that deal or no, I won't make that deal because it's unfair to me. We could also call for legislation to make DRM unattractive to DR holders as well -but unilateral action is not the solution.

>All your examples involve fraud, so they don't really apply here.

True, but if an artist or distributor in essence "says" I'll exchange music with you for compensation but you don't hold your end of the understanding, that's arguably fraud. In the Rihanna example, let's say the promoter says, in lieu of cash, I'm giving you exposure which I think is equivalent to 50,000 that does not absolve the promoter? She expected cash, not exposure to an audience who might represent future sales.