I'm all for science. I just have little time for someone whose only argument appears to be that no position has any merit unless an experiment he already acknowledged was impossible is conducted.

That works as a scientific principle, when "we simply don't know" is a perfectly acceptable conclusion. However, when you're talking about laws, you have to make some decision. Doing nothing until you have evidence you can never obtain is not an available option, because you can either choose to keep copyright or to get rid of it but you can't write a Heisenlaw. So in the absence of perfect, incontrovertible proof of the correct answer, all you can do is make the best guess you can based on whatever evidence you do have.

It is a fact that right now, today, millions of people are employed in creative industries, producing a higher volume of work than at any time in the history of humanity even controlling for population growth etc.

It is a fact that right now, today, the vast majority of the money that pays those people's salaries comes from selling copies of works that are subject to copyright.

It is a fact that in the recent past, experiments have been tried where works were offered on a choose-your-own-price model, approximating a situation where consumers were not legally compelled by a mechanism such as copyright to pay for them, and that typically the results of those experiments were that very few people contributed at an equal or higher level to the price many consumers pay in a similar context when the work is protected by copyright.

No, this is not a completely robust, 100% scientific, double-blinded, perfectly-controlled, alternative-realitied experiment. It's just the best data we've got today, based on actual facts like how much creative work is produced, where the money that funds that production comes from, and how it seems consumers behave in similar contexts when the copyright restrictions are removed. And on that basis, there's a strong argument in favour of maintaining some form of copyright in law as an economic incentive to support the creation and distribution of new works.

Now, if you've got more than your personal philosophical preferences to put in opposition to that, go ahead. But the argument for the basic principle of copyright is clear, and it's been generally supported by economic and political experts in many places for a long time despite the problems with practical enforcement. So if you want to convince anyone outside the choir you preach to, you'd better bring more than "the burden of proof is entirely on you and you haven't conducted an impossible experiment so I reject anything resembling rational evidence".

Of course they did. Laws don't make themselves. They are created by governments, and in democratic countries we all vote for those governments. If the people who want to have everything for free don't like copyright law, they can go vote for the Pirate Party and get it abolished.

So the ends justify the means?

Should we also default on all government debt tomorrow? That would save a fortune in the short term, which could be spent on valuable things like healthcare or education instead of servicing loans.

What about negotiating with hostage takers? You get the hostages back, so that's got to be a good deal.

What about when someone facing a serious charge in court is known to be guilty because of evidence that was collected illegally? All evidence should be admissible if it helps us to know who's guilty, I guess.

Sometimes you have to do something you don't like today, because the alternative is having to do something you'll like even less tomorrow.

Of course there is evidence of the benefit. Vast amounts of works are created and shared in our society that were possible because of copyright-backed economics. You can argue about the opportunity cost of our current system and whether another system might be better, but you can't dispute that a lot of stuff gets made and distributed as things stand.

However, if you're going to argue that another system would in fact provide a better economic incentive, promoting the creation or more or better works and their distribution to more people who can enjoy them, then the first thing you have to do is explain why no-one is already doing it. After all, as the creator of a work, you're perfectly entitled to let anyone have it without paying you if you want to, and not to enforce your copyright. Or you could use it to enforce a collaborative arrangement, like the GPL or Creative Commons. Or you could give away recorded performances in order to promote live ones you charge for. Or you could let people choose what, if anything, to pay for your recorded works so if they don't want to pay you anything they don't have to.

All of these things have been tried. There have been few successes, and many of those were for artists who were trying an experiment with new works after already making their name the old-fashioned way. The most promising alternative so far might be crowdsourcing, but even the biggest Kickstarter projects are still two orders of magnitude smaller in budget than the biggest Hollywood movies or AAA games.

Says who? That physical property you claim as your own was created from raw materials taken from the world around us, a world that belongs to us all. Why do you have any right to keep them exclusively for yourself? Even if you have possession of something right now, the default natural order of things is that if I have more friends or a bigger weapon I can take it from you and now I have possession of it instead, so why should government thugs protect you from that outcome?

It's ironic that you keep coming back to things like physical property and free markets and objecting to monopolies. The natural conclusion of a truly unregulated free market is often that one dominant supplier wins, and once competition has been eliminated that supplier has a monopoly indefinitely.

Of course not. The current legal position in the US is absurd.

Perhaps not yet, but the technology is already a lot closer and a lot cheaper than you might realise. Consider that luxury car models shipping today, or at least concept cars and tech demos, already use radar (parking sensors, adaptive cruise control systems, blind spot warnings), cameras (rear view displays, parking assistance complete with overlaid graphics, night vision complete with image recognition and hazard highlighting, lane drift detection), driver monitoring (alerts if eye movement patterns indicate loss of attention), the kind of pathfinding graphic overlays I mentioned before, and basic projection technology for dash-mounted HUDs. I've never seen state of the art versions in anything to do with cars, but modern eye-tracking technology used for things like usability testing with websites or experiments about how humans read is already impressively accurate, too.

We might not see this stuff in an average family car next year, but it pushes down from the top of the market, and if there are obvious safety benefits that tends to happen relatively quickly. The headlights on the car I bought a decade ago were relatively good at the time. Today, about three major generations of headlight technology later, those lights would look like candles next to a floodlit sports stadium. Five years ago, if you'd talked about having lasers in headlights, most people would have thought you were crazy. In five years, I expect everyday family cars will be using that kind of technology, or one of the other recent innovations, or something even better that has come along in the meantime.

Maybe, but I think the odds are against it. I suspect "augmented reality" displays for drivers will become reliable and useful enough to include in road-legal vehicles within the next five years, and that the technology will be reasonably common in a decade.

While we might also have things like automated convoy technology within that timescale, I'd guess it will be at least 15-20 years before fully self-driving vehicles are widely accepted on public roads, maybe more if there are serious accidents in the early days or it turns out that the only sufficiently safe and reliable technologies to operate at scale require the road network itself to be significantly updated and not just the vehicles. In any case it will probably be longer still before the average family can afford one, unless the technology gets good enough for governments to intervene on environmental or network efficiency grounds, and if we're jumping to full automation then whether we still use vehicles of the same sort of size/shape/capacity as we have today is another relevant question.

Yes, they did, but they chose to play the game according to certain rules agreed in advance.

Not if they can't do that because you cheated. Then it's your problem, and if it goes to court, you'll lose.

If you don't like those rules (copyright law) then you can seek to change them, and maybe if enough people agree you'll have different rules next time. But then the producers get to decide if they still want to play by your new rules before they commit any time and resources to creating anything else.

Yes it would, but that only matters if both suppliers can actually make the same product. If Supplier 1 didn't, and instead stole it off the back of a lorry from Supplier 2 before selling it on to you in turn, then when the police turn up they're going to take the stolen property away and you are the one who's going to be out of pocket.

Why? I have several personal domains, and each of my companies has more. None of these are on the scale of big labels, or anywhere close, yet all of them publish material of their own creation from their own facilities and all of them are responsible for their own content.

That's a mighty leap.

For one thing, as noted above, it's not impossible at all for an average Joe to upload something for the world to see, he'll just have to pay the true cost of sharing it. If he's not breaking any laws, he won't have any costs there. His ISP probably gives him a load of web space for free in most places, and he can wrap that in his own domain for a tiny amount of money each year. And if his material is really good and attracts a large audience requiring extra bandwidth, he'll easily be able to fund a bit of dedicated hosting through spin-off sales, advertising or other such arrangements, since he'll be free to make whatever arrangements he wants in this respect. All of this has been true for decades, and using these facilities requires different skills than uploading material to YouTube or Imgur or wherever, but not significantly greater or more difficult skills.

I suspect that the centralisation of content distribution that has happened because of high profile blogging and video sharing sites is in reality a net loss to our global, on-line society. It has created distortions and weaknesses in the Internet that weren't necessary, it has concentrated power and introduced single points of failure, but most of the benefits go to a new generation of middleman service that doesn't actually do any of the creative work that generates real value than the old middlemen like record labels and book publishers.

In any case, I'm not sure how you get from being forced to take responsibility for your actions if they are against the law to being guilty until proven innocent. It's more like not having a get out of jail free card when you're running a business that makes vast amounts of money by distributing content, much of which is being provided by people who don't have the rights to distribute it, when you know very well that this is happening and quite possibly your site only reached its dominant position by encouraging or at least turning a blind eye to such uses in its earlier days. Whatever the "greater good" arguments in favour of safe harbour arrangements today, I don't see why any of these services necessarily deserves that get out of jail free card.

Sure, and they made that choice when the rules said ripping them off and not paying them was illegal. You can't assume they would have made the same choice under other conditions.

If you don't like that part of the economy, you're welcome to spend your life enjoying only things that weren't supported by this kind of immoral and disgusting work. Good luck with that.

While you're sitting in your hut constructed without the aid of modern tools or building methods, reading your favourite amateur author's barely edited books by firelight because you can't use any modern lighting technologies, assuming you have good vision because you won't be able to wear any sort of glasses or contact lenses, you might consider why you think it's not equally immoral and disgusting that you are allowed to claim some of the world's finite natural resources as your own private property and have government thugs to prevent people from coming along and taking it away while you're asleep tonight.

Ultimately, any kind of property, whether physical or intellectual, is just an artificial concept that we as a society choose to recognise and protect because we've concluded that life is better in some way if we do so. You just only seem to like that philosophy when it's to your advantage.

Of course, because the cost of creating knowledge works is entirely the near-zero marginal cost of distribution and not dominated by the sometimes multi-million dollar sunk costs of production, and it's absurd that we should have an economic policy that allows amortizing the latter cost over the entire consumer base.

Learn some basic economics, please. Or at least try the instant thought experiment of asking yourself, "If everyone acted in the way I'm arguing causes no loss, would there still be no loss?" If the answer is no, there was a loss, you just dumped it on someone else instead of paying your fair share.

What about works of practical value that aren't particularly enjoyable to create, but which are nevertheless of great value to society? See: much of the software world, most school textbooks and professional training materials, etc.

By that argument, nowhere in the world has the right to free speech. If you think you have it in the US, consider what would happen if you yelled "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, or made defamatory claims against a celebrity, or threatened to kill the President, or anyone else, or made a misleading public statement as an executive of a publicly traded company, or claimed to be a qualified doctor/lawyer/engineer when not in fact holding the required qualification, or wanted to give classified national security information to Wikileaks or a major national newspaper.

The point would be that in a situation where the hosting service had to take responsibility for the material they were serving, they'd presumably have to satisfy themselves of its legitimacy before serving it. That might make their business more expensive to run, and as a society we've decided for now not to impose that burden, so we created safe harbour arrangements.

Even so, the world doesn't owe the operators of major Internet hosting sites a living, any more than it owes one to the big record labels or movie studios or game developers or book publishers. Requiring someone who's redistributing copyrighted material, from their own extremely profitable website, to take some responsibility if that redistribution would normally be illegal isn't an absurd alternative model.

But this is the problem, isn't it? The law didn't require anyone to take down your material under those conditions. It's Google/YouTube's arrangements with the big music labels that caused most of the problem here, and unfortunately as long as you choose to share your work on their service, you're always going to be subject to their whims and probably to them exploiting you for profit because of one-sided terms.

In most places that have safe-harbour style provisions, if you hosted the material on your own system, you would just have to provide contact details where the appropriate formal takedown notice could be sent, and when one of these abusive claims came in you could immediately make a counterclaim and leave your work untouched. Also, these laws typically require claims to be made under penalty of perjury (though sometimes with some weasel words about exactly what is claimed under that penalty that don't help the victims of abusive takedowns) so you might be able to chase after them for fun and/or profit if it's your system they're notifying and not some third party Google (who as you say might not care or want to get involved with that kind of dispute as long as their own legal backside is covered).

Well, there you go. At least they've done something positive for the world. ;-)

You think any government in the first world would cut Germany off the Internet because the German courts held someone in contempt for violating the spirit of a court ruling and comparing the courts with the Nazi party? I'd be surprised if you could find a single politician who wanted their name anywhere near that case.

If there are so many examples, it's odd that you only managed to cite one. But seriously, we've all heard of the **AA screwing up and suing grandmothers or two year olds or dead people. We know they make mistakes/act carelessly [delete as applicable], and once again, I have no problem with punishing them for any harm they do as a result.

But for every one of those, how many people escaped with some argument that an IP address didn't identify them specifically, even though it had been the fixed IP address of the broadband connection to the house in which only they lived for years, and 50 movies and 100 hit songs had been shared on BitTorrent over the past year from that IP address? Most of those people are guilty as sin.