It neither picks my pocket or breaks my leg for my neighbor to have a Rolex look-alike.

IOW, you know exactly what the argument is against allowing knockoff physical goods, and it has nothing to do with copyright, but you don’t want me to make that argument. Got it.

I wanted you to answer it because fraud is a chickenshit answer since a buyer who knows they’re buying a knock off isn’t being defrauded. I just wanted to see you say that you fully support allowing people to literally copy physical goods to such an extent that a casual viewer would never notice their copies (which is why many buyers of knock-off goods buy them). Either you admit you support that or you admit your position is tenuous.

Bullshit. The fact that the transaction can only be policed by building a massive surveillance apparatus is a very good reason not to regard the non-consenting parties as involved in the transaction. Because if they were being forced to participate in the transaction, they could then go to the police and say “I was robbed of my intellectual property at such-and-such a time and location.”

They’re claiming to be a party to all of these transactions, but that claim is extremely dubious on its face and I don’t feel obligated to take it seriously before criticizing their enforcement methods.

Agggh! You’re stealing bases in a philosophical debate that you started! You’re the one who raised the point about “consent” in the “transaction.” And so that has to be hashed out first before we start talking about surveillance and enforcement and whatnot. In other words, you’re conflating an ethical debate with a practical one.

Until it is settled that the transaction involves only consenting parties, we can’t skip ahead to quibbling over how the transaction is policed, let alone condemning its policing altogether.

You’ve not yet shown that. You have to prove that point first: You have to show that there’s no stakeholder who is non-consenting; or to put it another way, you have to show that the copyright claimant is not a stakeholder.

And look: You may well be able to do it! There certainly are solid arguments against intellectual property. But you must successfully make one of them before you get to say, “There are no non-consenting stakeholders in this transaction, and so policing the transaction is bullshit.”

Because the media re-echoed what the government wanted to slant and frame the issue.

Pirates are menaces to society.

Compound sounds militaristic, sinister, and foreboding. A wall surrounds a compound, of course.

There was no wall at Waco…..except a Wall of Fire on the final day. A dry, windy day in April….

No, no third party says that after an MP3 transaction, because they’re not involved. In order for them to find out about it, they’d have be performing surveillance before the fact. And that’s exactly why we need to be very very careful about this kind of law.

The drug scenario would be analogous to the copyright scenario only if some third party were laying claim to the property (the drug) itself.

I distribute to you an MP3. A third party says, “Whoa, hold up. Only *I* have the right to distribute that.”

I distribute to you a joint. There’s no third party saying, “Whoa, only *I* have the right to distribute that.”

They’re not analogous situations. There may be valid arguments against both copyright enforcement and drug enforcement. But they’re different arguments.

IOW, you know exactly what the argument is against allowing knockoff physical goods, and it has nothing to do with copyright, but you don’t want me to make that argument. Got it.

So tell me us how much you enthusiastically support knock off of physical goods without resorting to some chickenshit argument about trademarks and “fraud” to weasel out.

I think you just answered your own chickenshit question. It’s a different issue.

Neither is Apple when a Chinese company makes a 98% accurate knock off of one of their products. So tell me us how much you enthusiastically support knock off of physical goods without resorting to some chickenshit argument about trademarks and “fraud” to weasel out.

The copyright holder is not involved in the transaction.

So he may be begging the question, but if so, he’s doing it for both sides of the analogy.

With all due respect, you’re really confused.

This “transaction between two consenting adults” notion is wildly off-base here. You’re overlooking the fact that there is an adult in the equation who is very much NOT “consenting” to the “transaction”: the copyright holder.

If you wish to have a philosophical debate about copyright and the principles undergirding intellectual property, then have it. But until you have that debate — and prove that copyright holders have no moral claims — you don’t get to declare that the “consenting adults” in this equation are the only relevant parties involved. Otherwise you’re just begging the question.

Since time immemorial, pirates have been the common enemies of mankind, entitled to no more than summary justice. Swooping down on pirates with massive force is reasonable; sinking a pirate ship without warning may even be right.

People who make copies without having paid for a license to do so are not “pirates.” Calling them pirates makes the idiocy shown in this video more likely than it needs to be.

The police like the politicians are bought off today by banks and other corporations. They either do their dirty work and stand aside and watch.