You're going to need provide some further background to support your theory here. The only people that could afford books on any regular basis were nobles and the church. Both of those would be 'official channels.' Scribes and authors were held in roughly similar regard and were probably often one and the same. Nobody really cared about being original, so your theory of bandit scribes trying to take away the non-existent glory associated with typical authorship makes no sense.

Generally, the people who hired the scribes were nobles or those affiliated with the church. They were more concerned in having lots of books than in trying to take credit away from authors. There's not a real point to that when authors have no real credit to begin with. Now, maybe there were hiring scribes to make writing that would undermine other writings or writings supposedly by the author, but I've seen no evidence this practice was widespread or that it called piracy.

A viable alternative is doing nothing. The free market generally does as good or better.

I am opposed to copyright and patents overall. However, I do think that copyleft is a relatively appropriate way of reversing the damage that copyright does. It's not perfect, but it's a legal hack. It's taking poison and turning it in to an antidote, and in that regard, it's an incredible piece of work. My views are not identical to Stallman's, and while I agree with him on a number of subjects, I disagree with him on others.

If you are, like me, a copyright abolitionist, then, at least from our perspective, it would be just to ignore all copyright law, which would include violating the GPL. If you are doing much of anything other than asserting a new copyright on a GPL'd work (thus, selectively ignoring copyright law without a consistent basis) and aren't a billion dollar company, it probably isn't even worth it for the SFLC to bother you about your non-compliance. And if you are ideologically self-consistent, you would be ignoring lots of non-free licenses as well.

You seem to be interpreting my stance from the perspective that copyleft is unjust while the remainder of copyright is just. I've yet to see an even slightly cohesive consistent argument to back that viewpoint. There are many that hold that position, but none of them present decent points.

I'm going to need a source on that, because I believe you are confusing pirates with scribes. Scribes were about as valuable as authors since it took close to the same amount of labor to make a copy. As I understand it, originality wasn't seen as all that valuable in most of the world before the printing press. Excessive originality was often discouraged. It makes sense, given that at that time, perfect duplication was harder to come by. By today's standards, many of the masterpieces before copyright would be considered plagiarism today. That's not to say the notion of plagiarism didn't exist, as the earliest reference I can find is in the first century (although the earliest English reference I know of is in the 17th century, putting it after the the Stationer's company charter)

I think you misunderstood what I meant by ignoring or defying a law, or you don't grasp that the GPL is not a law. The law is copyright, so to ignore or defy copyright would be to make and distribute copies regardless of whether or not you have permission.

The GPL is not a law, but if you are ignoring copyright law, then there probably isn't a reason to just honor the GPL. The biggest concern with the GPL would be not allowing someone to freely share their derivative works with the community by enforcing your copyright. You obviously can't do that if you ignore copyright.

Probably the tried and true method of 7 proxies

It has more than one meaning because of centuries of propaganda dating back to the downright evil Stationer's Company, who made no semblance of copyright being for the purposes of advancement of learning or promoting the progress. Usage of the term 'piracy' in regards to copyright came from state sanctioned censors.

It happened before modern copyright. It was still copyright, but not as we know it. Back in the the olden days, you couldn't produce copies of anything unless the king granted you a 'copy right.' The only game in town was the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers, because they were a group that had agreed to print only works that make the king look good. They were undeniably a wicked and evil organization whose primary purpose was state sanctioned censorship and proliferation of propaganda. There were people who printed and distributed books outside of the Stationer's Company, and they were called pirates because the Stationer's Company didn't like that. In many cases, they probably were actual pirates involved, as Scotland was pretty keen on doing this, and one of the best methods of getting illegal books widely proliferated is by ships. Ships operating outside of the law would probably be doing most of this, so the label of pirate wasn't entirely inaccurate (although the perception of pirates was. Most of the time, pirates were people who were forced into working on a ship in a basically slavery sense and got tired of the bullshit.).

So, to recap, the term 'piracy' was used as propaganda in the past to describe a clearly corrupt legislative ancestor to copyright when it was partially accurate by a group of evil bastards whose purpose as an organization was contrary to the fundamental principles of modern democracies. Therefore, using it as propaganda today even though no ships are involved anymore is justified somehow.

It does seem to be copyright infringement, but saying it's deserving of criminal charges is crazy. And unjust law should be ignored if not actively defied.

I'm sure you are in favour of not having guns, but that does nothing to change whether or not guns exist. If it did, why not just skip a step and oppose being an asshole.

They can't phone home without a dial tone, though.

I know photoshop does that, and that most printers have dots whose stated purpose is to track counterfeiters.

https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display-tracking-dots
http://petapixel.com/2011/08/09/heres-what-happens-when-you-try-to-edit-photos-of-money-in-photoshop/

What a bar tender makes depends greatly on the establishment in question. However, as a general rule, they don't make a lot without tips. If they are tipped well, they can make a lot of money on a busy night. Also, you might not realize this, but the bar makes money off of the alcohol, not the bartender.