ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

So, an artist eeking out a living on something they worked hard on and released a month ago or two years ago gets sympathy from me. An artist who released a thing 20 years ago and still wants to eek out a living off that, such an artist doesn't really have my sympathy. The great-grandchildren who want to get paid for something an ancestor released 120 years ago[0]? Hell no, go do something yourself to make money.

If you're Lars Ulrich in 2000 and sue Napster over songs you released 10-20 years ago, while sitting on a net worth of maybe around 100-200M USD (now 350M), then my sympathy is with the pirates.

This doesn't touch the issue of how a lot of artists are not making much money, not because of pirates but because of predatory music labels and publishing houses.

It also ignores the problems with the "lost sales" theory. A lot of the pirates would have never paid for stuff they downloaded in the first place. And a lot of pirates started paying after pirating some stuff. E.g. I remember discovering a lot of artists from songs I illegally copied on LAN parties back in the day[1], usually artists too small to be on a lot of rotation on radio and MTV (yes, MTV used to have music, crazy) which I probably would have never known about otherwise. And I gave lots of money to these artists, buying their CDs, going to their concerts when possible, and so on. In the same vein, I discovered artists on whatcd and similar pirate places later on.

And doesn't touch on the "please take my money" issue... There are a lot of things that are out of print, etc, that you cannot pay for. E.g. large companies holding licenses to content may even take works out of print deliberately in tax avoiding schemes - I am not a Hollywood accountant, but from my limited understanding they can declare a loss when doing so which is worth a lot more in tax reduction than keeping a title in print.

And it also doesn't even touch humanity's need to preserve important cultural artifacts for the future.

[0] Remember, up to artists death + 70 years copyright term. While this exact scenario has probably not happened yet, as these rules are too new, you get a glimpse of what will happen in the future when you look about all the legal fighting still happening over Sherlock Holmes - a figure and body of worked created mostly before copyright law even existed.

[1] Yes, I am old. If you have no idea what a LAN party is, it's basically a bunch of people actually meeting in some venue with their computers, wire everything together into a temporary LAN, to play games and swap files, which back in the day really was the only sane way to do mulitplayer and filesharing stuff as internet speeds were so limited, and internet was usually very expensive, often still paying by the minute.

If so, then what is the purpose of specialization and efficiency, if not for the reduction of scarcity, in terms of individual access to resources? If cooperation wasn't beneficial for the individual, nobody would cooperate (unless forced to do so, but I personally wouldn't want to live in such a society).

> The artifice in making distribution of it remain difficult is therefore an extension of the natural place of scarce ideas in a world of abundant things.

The whole idea of monetizing ideas the same way we monetize material things comes from their representation in scarce material things, such as paper. There's nothing "naturally scarce" about ideas - I'd argue the opposite, the ideas can be multiplied and shared at zero cost to the original author of the idea. The only cost comes from the way in which ideas are distributed.

The golden age of music industry happened when the only way to distribute music at scale was to sell records. Producing records was costly, but since there was no other way to listen to music at home, people paid for them. Companies charged more than production cost, and they made profit. Nowdays, music can be distributed at almost zero cost, and every attempt to restrict that is just an attempt by old money to keep the old ways of business, since it was so profitable for them. Spotify and other music streaming services grew as an alternative. I'm not saying they're perfect, or even good - just that there's no reason why alternative models of monetization couldn't be invented.

My whole argument is that treating manifestation of ideas as scarce things is an outdated view - in the digital age, all it takes to share an idea is a few button clicks. Trying to force scarcity will never work unless we devolve into a surveillance dystopia, and we need another way to reward the authors.