Ranting to /dev/null

P2P is bad for piracy

This makes sense. There are now reports that the real people being hurt by online music sharing are pirates. If you were going to buy a legitimate copy, you were planning on spending some real money anyways. But if you're heading down to the flea market to drop $6 on three cases of CD-Rs, you don't care about legitimacy. So why spend anything at all?

Frankly, I'm entirely happy with this. While I think that there isn't anything wrong with and shouldn't be anything illegal about file-sharing, selling someone else's stuff is different. In the first case, you're simply propagating a good with an infinite supply. Nothing wrong with that. But in the latter, you're essentially committing fraud, by asserting that the stuff you're selling is in fact yours to sell. This is freeloading in a way that is different from simple copying. I don't think content creators should (or in fact can) control who copies their stuff, but only they should be able to make a living from it. Whether or not they actually can make a living is irrelevant, but it's clear that no one else should.