On the anti-piracy side there are two groups: The first are artists who believe, without any evidence, that they can make more money when copyright is enforced.
The second are people start out assuming that the right to control information is a moral right. They then derive the ethical implication that people shouldn't pirate.
On the pro-file sharing side there are two groups. The first are libertarian-inclined utilitarians, which require people to prove actual harm before something should be outlawed or have tried to start a tech company and been threatened with a patent lawsuit. Every piece of evidence not created by the middle-man industry I've ever seen has supported their position.
The second are people who oppose the idea of "intellectual property", starting from moral principles such as freedom of expression, utility maximization or historic precedent.
There is no need to come up with anything new to say: the conclusion one comes to depends on what principles one uses to derive ethical implications. Intellectual property is morally wrong, declares one side. Intellectual property is a moral imperative, declares the other. It is impossible for either to convince the other, since neither is basing their arguments on a rational basis where facts or evidence might play a role.
Anyone who might be convinced doesn't care, probably because they are just ignoring stupid laws anyway.
I totally agree. However I think we should include a third group in the pro-file sharing side: people who don't have the money to pay for content or just wont because they're cheap. The problem is that the anti-piracy side mostly sees this group instead of the other ones and that's why, imho, they claim that pirating is like stealing and that it causes the same damage.
There are people who want things for free. However before the internet those were the people trading bootlegs, buying $2 CDs from sketchy catalogs, borrowing cds from the library or friend, watching MTV, listening to the radio or simply not listening to music. I would argue that they are no more supportive of piracy than any other form of free entertainment.
Additionally, I don't believe most of them support piracy because they want free stuff (there are some horders out there, but that's an actual mental illness/tv show). Most of the people who "like free stuff" support piracy because they value the entertainment they get. By far the biggest group here are teenagers, and it appears that the more music teenagers without money download the more music they will buy legally later in life.
Right now teenage unemployment was 25% last summer and that's just among teenagers who wanted to work. Unpaid internships seem to have become the norm. If we don't give teenagers a way to get the medium of exchange we shouldn't be surprised that they develop parallel economies. That said, if they weren't going to buy music anyway or, as most studies find, people buy more music in the presence of file sharing, it doesn't imply that there is any theft going on or that creators are damaged in any way by more value being derived from the work they already did.
I think record companies see their control over the airwaves and their kingmaker roll slipping away. Like publishers, they are progressively less relevant and the services they do provide aren't worth nearly the percentage of profits they charge their artists. They don't need to believe it is theft for them to cynically exploit the argument in order to remain relevant.
Of course if you have nothing you can buy nothing so the producer would get no harm, but this is rarely the case.
I was a bit vague on this point but let me be more clear. "Don't have any money" doesn't mean having 0$ in your bank account, at least in this argument; it means that you are not willing to use the money you have to buy some things because in your opinion you have little money (compared to what you want to buy), so you decide to spend it for things you care about and can't get for free. Now, imagine a scenario where you can't get those things for free. In this scenario, you distribute your money differently in order to be able to buy the products you need. I can assure you there there are many people I know that have the money buy they tell me they don't have it to buy certain products, so they pirate it. They are being cheap. If they couldn't get those things for free they would pay for them. This kind of people cause harm to the producers.
Talking about a real example: in my country (Italy) many people have breakfast at bars with 2-3 euros and nobody will question this price. At the same time these people don't want to pay for a 99 cents song that will entertain them for days. This is something wrong and I see why producers want to change this kind of behavior. The problem is they are "doing it wrong" by enforcing (or trying to enforce) laws that protect things that just can't be protected anymore.
Is this a separate anti-intellectual property view:
I like content and am greedy for it. Copyright helps me get more content by providing incentive. This is the benefit.
Whatever these are benefits of copyright, the practical collateral costs (to privacy, freedom, making everyone a criminal etc) of enforcing copyright law make it not a worthwhile.
I would group those people in with creators who think that copyright means they'll earn more money. That is, people who are swayed by arguments appealing to the "common sense" that "artists should make money off their work" without specific evidence in support of their views.
Since copyright can be used to prevent content creation (for example, cover performances, sequel novels written by other people or derivative works) it isn't at all obvious that copyright leads to more content. The internet has led to more music and better music being made, according to the recent study I saw comparing radio play of new music over time. Webcomics make most of their money selling books of comics available for free on the web. For most of human history we functioned under a deliver-first, pay-later or -indirectly method of exchange; the internet has allowed this model to scale almost without limit for goods with zero marginal cost.
On the anti-piracy side there are two groups: The first are artists who believe, without any evidence, that they can make more money when copyright is enforced. The second are people start out assuming that the right to control information is a moral right. They then derive the ethical implication that people shouldn't pirate.
On the pro-file sharing side there are two groups. The first are libertarian-inclined utilitarians, which require people to prove actual harm before something should be outlawed or have tried to start a tech company and been threatened with a patent lawsuit. Every piece of evidence not created by the middle-man industry I've ever seen has supported their position. The second are people who oppose the idea of "intellectual property", starting from moral principles such as freedom of expression, utility maximization or historic precedent.
There is no need to come up with anything new to say: the conclusion one comes to depends on what principles one uses to derive ethical implications. Intellectual property is morally wrong, declares one side. Intellectual property is a moral imperative, declares the other. It is impossible for either to convince the other, since neither is basing their arguments on a rational basis where facts or evidence might play a role.
Anyone who might be convinced doesn't care, probably because they are just ignoring stupid laws anyway.