US commissions Swedish IP law (WikiLeaks/Pirate Party)

[haard]

http://falkvinge.net/2011/09/05/cable-r ... -monopoly/

commissions
This is from the leader of the Swedish Pirate Party, so a grain of salt or two may be recommended.
Long article, click the linky for all of it.

Among the treasure troves of recently released WikiLeaks cables, we find one whose significance has bypassed Swedish media. In short: every law proposal, every ordinance, and every governmental report hostile to the net, youth, and civil liberties here in Sweden in recent years have been commissioned by the US government and industry interests.

I can understand that the significance has been missed, because it takes a whole lot of knowledge in this domain to recognize the topics discussed. When you do, however, you realize that the cable lists orders for the Swedish Government to implement a series of measures that significantly weakens Sweden’s competitive advantage in the IT field against the US. We had concluded this was the case, but had believed things had come from a large number of different sources. That was wrong. It was all coordinated, and the Swedish Government had received a checklist to tick off. The Government is described in the cables as “fully on board”.
Since 2006, the Pirate Party has claimed that traffic data retention (trafikdatalagring), the expansion of police powers (polismetodutredningen), the law proposal that attempted to introduce Three Strikes (Renforsutredningen), the political trial against and persecution of The Pirate Bay, the new rights for the copyright industry to get subscriber data from ISPs (Ipred) — a power that even the Police don’t have — and the general wiretapping law (FRA-lagen) all have been part of a greater whole, a whole controlled by American interests. It has sounded quite a bit like Conspiracies ’R’ Us. Nutjobby. We have said that the American government is pushing for a systematic dismantlement of civil liberties in Europe and elsewhere to not risk the dominance of American industry interests, in particular in the area of copyright and patent monopolies.

But all of a sudden, there it was, in black on white. It takes the description so far that the civil servants in the Justice Department, people I have named and criticized, have been on the American Embassy and received instructions.

This will become sort of a longish article, as I intend to outline all the hard evidence in detail, but for those who want the executive summary, it is this: The Pirate Party was right on every detail. The hunt for ordinary Joes who share music and movies with one another has been behind the largest dismantlement of civil liberties in modern history, and American interests have been behind every part of it.

At the middle of this, we find the US cable Stockholm 09-141, recommending Sweden to not be blacklisted by the US on the so-called Special 301 list, and outlines why. The Special 301 is a list that the United States compiles every year that names and shames countries that haven’t been friendly enough to American industries. A majority of the world’s population is on the list, Canada and Spain among them. It’s quite nice company to be in, actually.
Since the 1980s, the US has aggressively threatened trade sanctions against countries who don’t give American companies sufficiently large competitive advantages — this is described in detail in the book Information Feudalism about the origins of the TRIPs agreement and WTO, for those interested in gory details. In practice, it works like this: industry associations in the US go to the Trade Representatives, who go to the myriad offices dealing with Foreign Policy, who go to the embassies, who talk to national governments (including the Swedish one) and demand changes to national law to benefit American corporations.

This sounds like fiction, right? But here are the documents. This document comes from the copyright industry’s trade association IIPA, mainly consisting of record and movie companies. They have listed six demands on the Swedish Government, which stand to find in the linked document:

1. Adopt the copyright law amendments on injunctive relief against ISPs and a “right of information” to permit rights holders to obtain the identity of suspected infringers from ISPs in civil cases
2. Prosecute to the fullest extent the owners of ThePirateBay [sic]
3. Increase the prosecutorial and police manpower devoted to criminal Internet piracy enforcement
4. Commence a national criminal enforcement campaign to target source piracy and large scale Internet pirates
5. Ensure that rights holders may pursue the new civil remedies easily and quickly
6. Take an active role fostering ISP-rights holder discussions to effectively prevent protected content from being distributed without authorization over the Internet

continued...

[TheHammer]

http://falkvinge.net/2011/09/05/cable-r ... -monopoly/

commissions
This is from the leader of the Swedish Pirate Party, so a grain of salt or two may be recommended.
Long article, click the linky for all of it.

Among the treasure troves of recently released WikiLeaks cables, we find one whose significance has bypassed Swedish media. In short: every law proposal, every ordinance, and every governmental report hostile to the net, youth, and civil liberties here in Sweden in recent years have been commissioned by the US government and industry interests.

I can understand that the significance has been missed, because it takes a whole lot of knowledge in this domain to recognize the topics discussed. When you do, however, you realize that the cable lists orders for the Swedish Government to implement a series of measures that significantly weakens Sweden’s competitive advantage in the IT field against the US. We had concluded this was the case, but had believed things had come from a large number of different sources. That was wrong. It was all coordinated, and the Swedish Government had received a checklist to tick off. The Government is described in the cables as “fully on board”.
Since 2006, the Pirate Party has claimed that traffic data retention (trafikdatalagring), the expansion of police powers (polismetodutredningen), the law proposal that attempted to introduce Three Strikes (Renforsutredningen), the political trial against and persecution of The Pirate Bay, the new rights for the copyright industry to get subscriber data from ISPs (Ipred) — a power that even the Police don’t have — and the general wiretapping law (FRA-lagen) all have been part of a greater whole, a whole controlled by American interests. It has sounded quite a bit like Conspiracies ’R’ Us. Nutjobby. We have said that the American government is pushing for a systematic dismantlement of civil liberties in Europe and elsewhere to not risk the dominance of American industry interests, in particular in the area of copyright and patent monopolies.

But all of a sudden, there it was, in black on white. It takes the description so far that the civil servants in the Justice Department, people I have named and criticized, have been on the American Embassy and received instructions.

This will become sort of a longish article, as I intend to outline all the hard evidence in detail, but for those who want the executive summary, it is this: The Pirate Party was right on every detail. The hunt for ordinary Joes who share music and movies with one another has been behind the largest dismantlement of civil liberties in modern history, and American interests have been behind every part of it.

At the middle of this, we find the US cable Stockholm 09-141, recommending Sweden to not be blacklisted by the US on the so-called Special 301 list, and outlines why. The Special 301 is a list that the United States compiles every year that names and shames countries that haven’t been friendly enough to American industries. A majority of the world’s population is on the list, Canada and Spain among them. It’s quite nice company to be in, actually.
Since the 1980s, the US has aggressively threatened trade sanctions against countries who don’t give American companies sufficiently large competitive advantages — this is described in detail in the book Information Feudalism about the origins of the TRIPs agreement and WTO, for those interested in gory details. In practice, it works like this: industry associations in the US go to the Trade Representatives, who go to the myriad offices dealing with Foreign Policy, who go to the embassies, who talk to national governments (including the Swedish one) and demand changes to national law to benefit American corporations.

This sounds like fiction, right? But here are the documents. This document comes from the copyright industry’s trade association IIPA, mainly consisting of record and movie companies. They have listed six demands on the Swedish Government, which stand to find in the linked document:

1. Adopt the copyright law amendments on injunctive relief against ISPs and a “right of information” to permit rights holders to obtain the identity of suspected infringers from ISPs in civil cases
2. Prosecute to the fullest extent the owners of ThePirateBay [sic]
3. Increase the prosecutorial and police manpower devoted to criminal Internet piracy enforcement
4. Commence a national criminal enforcement campaign to target source piracy and large scale Internet pirates
5. Ensure that rights holders may pursue the new civil remedies easily and quickly
6. Take an active role fostering ISP-rights holder discussions to effectively prevent protected content from being distributed without authorization over the Internet

continued...

Quite frankly, copyrighted material such as Music, Movies, and Software are among the few things we still "make" here in the U.S. So You can hardly be surprised that we are taking protection of those things very seriously.

[Todeswind]

Not to sound rude but how in the hell is the US government remotely in the wrong on this one? File sharing is a "victimless" crime in that nobody gets hurt and there is no obvious theft, so people can commit it without feeling the guilt they would feel for shoplifting or stealing a car but it doesn't mean that it is any less a theft of property. People are stealing billions of dollars worth of intellectual property, largely through a website operated in Sweden because Swedish law does not prosecute the type of information transfer that the Pirate Bay engages in. Its the same sort of political loophole that the child pornography industry in Japan uses to avoid prosecution.

America wants the Swedish government to stop harboring the organization that operates as the fence for most of the worlds computer data theft. So far as American "secret dealings" go, this one is pretty banal.

[Xon]

Awesome, only 2 replies before hitting a utterly wrong "copyright violation is stealing" bullshit.

[Purple]

I think the issue is not that they are secretly effecting foreign out IP protection laws but that they are secretly effecting foreign laws period. The idea (no mater how silly it might sound) is that the people of a nation should by virtue of living in a democracy be the ones that through their representatives decide on laws that are made and that these decisions should be made primarily for the benefit of the people of said nation and based on objective and publicly available reasons and not as a result of secret dealings with foreign governments. It does not mater what the actual laws were about but the fact that they came not from the people by the people and for the people but from America by America for America. Hell, if my understanding of decadent western democracies is correct people should be outraged by this turn of events even had these laws been superior in every way for the sake of benefiting the Swedish people than anything the people of Sweden could think of simply becouse of the way they were created. And that way was the people getting cheated by their government to please foreign interests.

[Xon]

Another thing is the laws are largely championed as local movement, despite being either a whole owned American corporation interest group(s) or so closely aligned you can't tell the difference.

[Todeswind]

The entire point of having international diplomacy at all is to affect the policies of other nations in a manner that results in an overall positive outcome for your own people. Diplomats regularly suggest, or are even involved in the creation of, laws in foreign nations. There are an insane number of lobbyists in DC who promote the interests of foreign nations who's entire jobs are to do pretty much exactly what is outlined in the article on behalf of the interests of European Nations. It's not very from the way in which corporate interests or NGOs try to involve themselves in the legislative process.

The US government views file-shairng as a threat to the economy, it is both logical and practical that they should try to affect change.

EDIT: Changed several unintentionally inflammatory words.

[Todeswind]

Awesome, only 2 replies before hitting a utterly wrong "copyright violation is stealing" bullshit.

And how, exactly, is it bullshit?

[Stofsk]

Because copyright violation is not stealing.

[Xon]

Awesome, only 2 replies before hitting a utterly wrong "copyright violation is stealing" bullshit.

And how, exactly, is it bullshit?

Becaue if I stole someone's copyright they would physically be unable to use it. That's the dictionary and legal definition of stealing; depriving the owner of thier property by taking it without payment or authorization. Copyright violation is an unauthorized copying, the original IP holder still has thier IP but now I have a copy.

It's also a lie and utterly inaccurate to claim that all copyright violations are actually a lost sale.

[ThomasP]

People are stealing billions of dollars worth of intellectual property, largely through a website operated in Sweden because Swedish law does not prosecute the type of information transfer that the Pirate Bay engages in. Its the same sort of political loophole that the child pornography industry in Japan uses to avoid prosecution.

Ignoring that theft isn't copyright infringement in either legal or "real" economic terms, what is it that leads you to believe The Pirate Bay is responsible for a majority of file-sharing traffic?

I'm interested to know how you quantify that, and how the number you arrive at justifies the kind of sovereignty-violating policy-laundering that the US has been pushing around the world (this kind of trade-sanction strong-arming hasn't been limited to Sweden by any stretch).

[Todeswind]

Ignoring that theft isn't copyright infringement in either legal or "real" economic terms, what is it that leads you to believe The Pirate Bay is responsible for a majority of file-sharing traffic?

I'm interested to know how you quantify that, and how the number you arrive at justifies the kind of sovereignty-violating policy-laundering that the US has been pushing around the world (this kind of trade-sanction strong-arming hasn't been limited to Sweden by any stretch).

I don't believe that the Pirate Bay is responsible for all of filesharing any more than I blame a fencer of stolen goods for the social presence of theft but it is foolish for the US government to ignore such an obvious target. The pirate bay is only one of numerous file-sharing sites based in Sweden but it is the file sharing site that is the most well known, and it is the file sharing site that has made a policy of telling the US Government to go fuck itself.

As to your comments about "policy-laundering" and "strong-arming," this is how international diplomacy functions. It is the core function of international diplomacy. Trying to convince other nations to change their laws and customs in such a way that benefits your nation (or the world at large) is the entire point. It just happens that in this case the US governments ability to threaten Sweden with economic sanctions is substantially more powerful than Sweden's ability to counter those economic sanctions.

And as to "copyright infringement not being stealing" Scott Adams summed up my feelings on the matter quite well.

I keep seeing an argument on the Internet, including in the comments here, that goes like this:

“Copyright violation is not stealing. If I steal something physical, the original owner no longer has it. But if I violate a copyright, the original owner has lost nothing tangible. So while copyright violation is illegal, it’s very different from stealing. In fact, it’s good publicity and might even benefit the person from whom you stole.”

I understand the point that copyright violations are different from theft of physical property, but is it a victimless crime?

When you violate a copyright, you take something valuable from the copyright owner that he can’t get back. You take his right to control where his creation is viewed and how. It might be your opinion that the “free publicity” you provide outweighs the loss – and you might be right – but you’ve taken from the creator the right to make the publicity-versus-overexposure decision himself. That might not seem like a big deal to you, but it feels that way to the person who lost control of his art.

Let me give you an analogy. Let’s say your neighbor sneaks into your house while you are gone and borrows your underpants. After wearing your underpants all day, the neighbor launders them, folds them neatly, and returns them to your house in perfect condition, all while you are gone. He tells himself that he will say good things to people about your business – whatever business that is – so this arrangement is good publicity for you. The next time he sees you, he tells you about the underpants because he figures you’ll thank him for saying nice things about his business. He informs you that it’s a win-win scenario.

Given that you have full use of your property (the underpants), is it a victimless crime? I would say the owner of the underpants lost something even though his property is physically the same.

Some people argue that copyright laws create an artificial property right that is inherently different, and less worthy than the more natural right to own physical property, such as your clothes. But it seems to me that you only own your clothes because the law says so. Absent any artificial laws, I could go into your closet and wear your clothes whenever I want. All property rights are artificial. Copyrights are no different.

For the record, I never mind when people make copies of Dilbert for their personal use. If you want to e-mail your favorite comic to a friend, that’s great. We even make that easy by providing a button for that purpose on Dilbert.com.

But obviously there has to be a limit. After I published my first best-selling book, The Dilbert Principle, within days it had been illegally scanned and was widely available on the Internet for free. Technically speaking, it wasn’t theft. But I still lost something. I (and my publisher) lost the ability to decide if, when, and how to publish as an e-book. You can’t compete with “free and immediate.”

From a legal standpoint, taking a creator’s right to control distribution of his art is not “theft.” It’s just “taking something that used to legally belong to someone else and making it your own.”

You may now activate your cognitive dissonance and explain in the comments that every time you violate a copyright, the free publicity it generates for the artist is proof of your goodness. To make your argument extra powerful, note that you once knew a guy who bought an extra CD because of the 12,000 songs he took for free.

[Mr Bean]

Scott Adams is an idiot, taking his analogy seriously what he should have said is that when someone violates copyright they are duplicating a duplicate. IE I'm not sneaking into your house, given how filesharing works I'm visiting the store looking at the product in question and duplicating it. Then that duplicate is traded around and duplicates of the duplicates are traded. The underpants example is terrible because A you never visited the house to begin with and B borrowing the underpants deprives the original owner of the item.

Which would be theft
If I break into your house and take your underpants then duplicate them thread for thread at my house I've still stolen your underpants if temporary oh and committed breaking and entering.
And how is that for an out of context line?

Regardless the point is if I go online and download a pdf copy of one of Scott Adams Dilbert compilations I've not stolen nothing. In fact if I download a copy directly scanned from a store book collection and send it to 100 of my best friends then print out copies and use them to shingle my roof I've still not stolen anything from Scott Adams.
What I have done is violated is copyright for reproducing his work without his permission.
And that's not theft, especially as I intend to only use his works for roofing materials.

[ThomasP]

I don't believe that the Pirate Bay is responsible for all of filesharing any more than I blame a fencer of stolen goods for the social presence of theft but it is foolish for the US government to ignore such an obvious target. The pirate bay is only one of numerous file-sharing sites based in Sweden but it is the file sharing site that is the most well known, and it is the file sharing site that has made a policy of telling the US Government to go fuck itself.

The realities of BitTorrent protocol make this a misleading argument, at best.

To the latter, why is it foolish? What grounds does the US government have involving themselves at all? Copyright infringement on a peer-to-peer basis is a civil matter, only becoming criminal when certain criteria are met (usually applied to large-scale operations). Given that the losses from piracy of digital goods are dubious, at best (and a more honest evaluation is "made up by industry groups"), it's hard to trace the action to the response.

As to your comments about "policy-laundering" and "strong-arming," this is how international diplomacy functions. It is the core function of international diplomacy. Trying to convince other nations to change their laws and customs in such a way that benefits your nation (or the world at large) is the entire point. It just happens that in this case the US governments ability to threaten Sweden with economic sanctions is substantially more powerful than Sweden's ability to counter those economic sanctions.

That may well be, and it's also fine for the citizens of allegedly democratic nations to protest their government's concession to said demands, and for them to criticize the preponderance of trade organizations in international diplomacy which make such a situation possible.

Writing it off as "well that's how it's done" is not an instant end-of-conversation rebuttal.

And as to "copyright infringement not being stealing" Scott Adams summed up my feelings on the matter quite well.

The lack of distinction between usage and possession that underlies physical objects (i.e., to use a bicycle, it must be in your possession) has lost any meaning in application to digital goods (where possession is no longer the bottleneck), and because of that his analogy of the underwear thieves simply can't apply. As Mr. Bean pointed out, with marginal costs of production at zero, you can take possession of a digital work without in any way affecting the original, nor the owner's utility.

Adams is trying to paint it as if you're robbing content owners of an innate property right, but this is a matter of technology altering the economics of the playing field -- copyright has only ever been a legal construct meant to strike balance between public good and creator rights, and in its current form it's proving itself to be vastly obsolete within the current landscape.

[Soontir C'boath]

Whether they're losing sales or not, the fact is that you are still enjoying someone's work without paying for it and no, it is not the equivalent of your friend loaning you the movie or music album, etc given the heightened scale file sharing can reach.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

Whether they're losing sales or not, the fact is that you are still enjoying someone's work without paying for it and no, it is not the equivalent of your friend loaning you the movie or music album, etc given the heightened scale file sharing can reach.

Except for the fact that your enjoyment of their work has cost them absolutely nothing, since it takes no effort on their part to digitally replicate what they've already done, thus no one is harmed by the action.

[Broomstick]

If the artist/creator/owner would have otherwise enjoyed sales or royalties that he/she now does not due to unauthorized copying yes, that person HAS been harmed by being deprived of money they would otherwise have.

Or will you now argue that money no longer exists because it moves electronically these days?

In the end, it comes down to money - the control granted by copyright laws allows the owner of copyright to make money from the use of that copyright. Illegal copying on a massive scale deprives the owner of those sales.

[darthdavid]

If the artist/creator/owner would have otherwise enjoyed sales or royalties that he/she now does not due to unauthorized copying yes, that person HAS been harmed by being deprived of money they would otherwise have.

Or will you now argue that money no longer exists because it moves electronically these days?

In the end, it comes down to money - the control granted by copyright laws allows the owner of copyright to make money from the use of that copyright. Illegal copying on a massive scale deprives the owner of those sales.

Except that only applies to people who would have otherwise bought the work in question but didn't because they were able to download it for free instead. If someone wouldn't have paid for it under any circumstances then pirating something hurts no one. If someone is 'trying before they buy' piracy can help by letting people find things they like without having pay money before they know it's worth it.

As for money, the music and film industries are notorious for screwing the actual artists out of it at every opportunity and they're the ones who get hurt by any lost sales that do exist, not the artists themselves. Why should I care if the bastards get what's coming to them?

[Purple]

...
Illegal copying on a massive scale deprives the owner of those sales.

The critical word there thou is IF. When purchasing something, be it a digital or physically product the bottleneck is always money. The operative question being: Do I desire this product sufficiently that I am willing to pay its price for it given a limited total amount of resources to spend. On the other hand due to the lack of a direct cost the bottleneck for people pirating are bandwidth and hard drive space. The question they ask them self is: Can I fit this on my hard drive and is it to big and hence slow for me to download.

Now, I know I am not hailed as the most brilliant of minds around these parts. But even I can see that it does not take a rocket scientist to determine that given a realistic average person of average income the individual in question can pirate many orders of magnitude more data than he could reasonably purchase. Therefore it can be extrapolated that only that small fraction of the pirated material is something the average pirate would actually have purchased are lost sales and everything else is simply sales that would newer have occurred at all.

I will leave it to others to question the morality of the situation. All I have contributed is the math.

[Broomstick]

You are all forgetting another portion of the pirating problem - illegal sales of illegal copies. That is, people who download a product, make copies, then sell those copies, thereby diverting the revenue stream from the legitimate owners to someone else.

Can't see how you could argue that's NOT theft, as someone is clearly willing and able to pay for the product, yet it's not the legitimate owner who receives the money.

[darthdavid]

You are all forgetting another portion of the pirating problem - illegal sales of illegal copies. That is, people who download a product, make copies, then sell those copies, thereby diverting the revenue stream from the legitimate owners to someone else.

Can't see how you could argue that's NOT theft, as someone is clearly willing and able to pay for the product, yet it's not the legitimate owner who receives the money.

Except that if someone was going to do that the expense of just getting a legit copy of whatever they were going to sell is fairly trivial next to the profit they'll make doing the selling, especially given that the vast majority of counterfeiting is done on an industrial scale and the people selling DVD-Rs at flea markets or whatever only account for a small percentage of such activity.

[Faqa]

So? If I pirate 10 times more than I would ever buy, then 10% of what I pirated is what I might've bought if Bittorrent was not an option.

Does pirating prevent anyone else from purchasing? No.

Does it impair the seller's ability to sell his product? No.

Does a significant portion of an individual's piracy constitute content he would have bought at the seller's asking price? Probably not, and the portion is getting smaller as the Internet gets faster and hard drives get cheaper.

But does any of this change the fact that it is very hard to make a living off digital content when paying for it is effectively optional for a work of any popularity? Also, no.

As for money, the music and film industries are notorious for screwing the actual artists out of it at every opportunity and they're the ones who get hurt by any lost sales that do exist, not the artists themselves. Why should I care if the bastards get what's coming to them?

A - The artist's shitty cut of the profits IS impacted.
B - These "bastards" are the ones who took the actual financial risks on the work. Without their filthy, filthy money, the work wouldn't be there. So you should care because without them the content to be downloaded would not exist. And because they deserve a return on the investment they made, given that it was clearly a good one - you're downloading the fucker, aren't you?


That said, I do view P2P downloading as a fairly healthy market force - without it, or something like it, companies wouldn't even have to consider ways to sell their product online. It creates pressure on the companies to make things easier and more convenient for the consumer, and that is something sorely needed. Even if the pressure can be phrased thusly: "Give us what we want when we want it, on the terms we want it or we'll take it anyway and break your fucking legs (i.e, not pay)".

[Purple]

You are all forgetting another portion of the pirating problem - illegal sales of illegal copies. That is, people who download a product, make copies, then sell those copies, thereby diverting the revenue stream from the legitimate owners to someone else.

Can't see how you could argue that's NOT theft, as someone is clearly willing and able to pay for the product, yet it's not the legitimate owner who receives the money.

That is becouse I am not arguing against that. And that is becouse it is not something that can be argued against.
Yes, if someone downloads something from the internet illegally and than resells it he is stealing. Or rather that sort of behavior falls under the same category as reverse engineering someone else's product and selling it or other forms of industrial espionage. So yes, it is a crime.

My argument was referring to the other demographic. The ones who download stuff for their own use and share it among them self for no profit on either side.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

If the artist/creator/owner would have otherwise enjoyed sales or royalties that he/she now does not due to unauthorized copying yes, that person HAS been harmed by being deprived of money they would otherwise have.

Or will you now argue that money no longer exists because it moves electronically these days?

In the end, it comes down to money - the control granted by copyright laws allows the owner of copyright to make money from the use of that copyright. Illegal copying on a massive scale deprives the owner of those sales.

I'll just address this post, since it immediately followed mine and everything else is just further elaboration on it.

Stop. Please stop.

Now maybe I could be accused of not being clear enough, but I really hope that others are perceptive enough, or at least willing to grant that someone of even basic intelligence knows the difference between 'piracy' on an individual scale for personal enjoyment and the 'piracy' that involves massive illegal production of someone else's work for profit. Amazingly enough, people *are* capable of supporting the former and not the latter, and there's an even more mind-blowing revelation that the two are not actually the same thing! So please, for the sake of everyone with basic intelligence and a desire for honesty in debate: Quit trying to equivocate the two.

Wide-scale copyright infringement for profit is illegal, and rightfully so. Now I'm going to make a technically unevidenced assumption that no one here is in support of such practices because I'm willing to give people here the benefit of the doubt that they're, as a whole, decent, ethical people. As such, when they speak out in support of things like file-sharing, I'm not going to immediately assume they support things like large-scale piracy. Moreover, I am not going to assume that one automatically leads to the other, and that trying to associate the two as is so commonly done by those firmly against file-sharing is both a non-sequitar and a strawman of our position. I'd greatly respect it if this courtesy was shown by everyone involved in the debate.

Both mass-piracy and 'file-sharing' have existed long before things started moving over to an almost wholly digital medium. The former showed up in things like mass-production of bootleg VHS tapes from third-world countries, the latter in the form of someone recording a cassette tape and giving it to his friend. The former does hurt sales, the latter has been proven time and again to either have either completely negligible impact, or actually help sales in the form of free advertisement. They were completely different activities, with completely different motives, scale, and effects on sales then, they are still completely different activities now. So I ask again, for the sake of not causing intelligent peoples' eyes to twitch: Quit trying to equivocate the two. Quit jumping between one form and the other whenever it suits whatever point you're trying to make. Quit assuming that just because someone supports one type, they must automatically support the other type. And, if it's not too much to ask: At least give people the benefit of the doubt and, until proven otherwise, take it as read that no one here supports profit-driven mass-piracy.

I think this would ease a lot of headaches all around.

[Soontir C'boath]

If you were given a choice to buy an item or receive it for free, what would you do?

Assuming that there are no such people who would pay for the item but now just rather get it for free is the crux of what seems to be those who want file sharing. So please, stop giving us headaches all around and stop thinking there is no harm done.