The EU suppressed a 300-page study that found piracy doesn’t harm sales (2017)

It’s the nature of how computers make copying an initial work nearly zero additional cost.

This has never been the case in human history prior to digital/analog recording of content, and it keeps getting closer and closer to zero cost to duplicate.

This breaks people’s moral framework because they now have to grasp things like game theory to understand second and third order harm.

I don't know about Stallman, but, as I interpret it, Bradley Kuhn agrees with you.

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2022/mar/17/copyleft-ethical-...

> Even 10 years is too generous. I'd rather make it 0 instead. I said 10 years because it's what would make copyright tolerable. The right thing as far as I'm concerned is abolishing it straight up. 10 years is a reasonable compromise.

That's not a reasonable compromise. Your proposal of 0 years in a nonstarter, and walking slightly back from that is still a nonstarter. It's pretty clear your prioritizing only your own interests and desires, and not even really thinking about anyone else's.

For instance: have you considered that abolishing copyright would abolish the GPL, too? As in, you'd have no right to demand the source to modified GPL code that was distributed. The foundation of the GPL is copyright.

Copyright was created for good reason. It is not reasonable to get mad and burn it all down without considering those reasons, and the other effects burning it down will cause.

> Remember, copyright exists at all because we allow it. The raw reality these monopolists face is that public domain is the default state of all information. We're all just pretending that we can't easily copy this stuff.

We're also all pretending that we can't easily kill other people (btw, we totally can, and you probably regularly operate a 3,000lb death machine).

> The social contract was: we pretend we don't know how to copy their stuff, they get to make their money and then the works enter the public domain. They're clearly not keeping up their end of the social contract. Why should we? We should all just stop pretending we're dumb enough not to download their stuff at zero cost.

They're advocating for their interests, "we've" advocated for ours, so stuff is entering public domain (Steamboat Willie is almost there, and there are no copyright extensions in the works to keep it there).

The correct solution is to dial back the previous excesses in term lengths to something long enough that it wouldn't imperil investment in the production of new works (which can be hundreds of millions of dollars per).

> After all, Gaben’s primary product is essentially a DRM platform (one of the first online DRM platforms for that matter!), evidently he believes he can’t compete with piracy on service quality alone.

He absolutely can. Steam is DRM but it's the least shitty DRM implementation I've ever seen. I get very angry when corporations start rolling their own shitty stores instead of just using Steam for everything. I have games on my account that used to be sold on Steam but aren't available anymore because the corporation made their own store. It's hard to describe how aggravating that is.

Back in the day I'd buy games I already had on Steam just for the convenience of having them on Steam. There's a reason people don't remember what PC gaming used to be like before Steam and it's because Steam made them forget all about stuff like downloading multiple 500 MB incremental patches just to play online. Steam is essentially the Windows package manager.

Some of those who would pirate aren't going to pay regardless. This is unremarkable economically -- we're all used to the ideas of price points and elasticity. Every market for a good or service will segment into people whose demand is inelastic, people who register at somewhat elastic levels of demand / substitutability, and people whose demand is very elastic and substitutable. Piracy & other forms of uncompensated acquisition just invite us to think about segments where the price point is vanishing.

DRM probably works best in situations where it's also paired with convenience and there are modest to high levels of inelastic demand (and in the realm of low-to-modest levels of inelasticity, convenience might be enough even w/o DRM)

The other fact about piracy that's probably worth considering is that in some cases it can produce future sales. Not all people have an agreeable desire to contribute economically and understand that piracy means they haven't compensated the provider, which threatens their incentive/ability to provide more, but some do, and will eventually buy in when they're less price sensitive or more convinced of the value in a work by experience with it.

(This last point, incidentally, is one reason why I think Spotify's narrative of having saved the industry from piracy is self-serving and wrong to the point it may even have done more damage than the piracy it replaced via convenience for many. Someone engaging in music piracy knows they aren't contributing to a musician economically but may well decide to make legit purchases once they're a fan with a relationship to the artist's work. Someone using Spotify is encouraged to believe they're engaged in a legitimate economic exchange with the artist and is less likely to feel a need for later fan buy-in... when in fact the economics of platforms are practically indistinguishable from piracy for many artists.)