Well, somebody read my wall of text after all! Here's another!
> No - labour is the work, effort, and time - and charging twice is fraud.
I don't understand. How are you charging twice if you ask two people to compensate you for the value you provided? Value is everything. Or do you think people should be paid for their "work, effort, and time" for just digging holes up and filling them up again?
> McCarthyism and FUD. Also, when you watch pornography, the terroists win.
I'm guessing you haven't lived in a communist regime, but know anyone who did? I know some from ex-communist countries like Romania, old USSR, some current day states in India, etc. They all have a deep horror of communism. There is a reason it fails hard.
> Money is whatever I accept as payment and that does not need a government (a government of one is hardly a government).
The point was, information has value of varying, contextually-dependent amounts, either inherently or artificially through monopolies, and uncontrolled duplication can have very bad economic effects. Money is just one example. Copying information is not just copying bits. Ask yourself why printing money is restricted. Ask yourself why bitcoin works the way it does.
> That works both ways: charging for ideas has distorted access to knowledge via the Internet.
Distorted, how? If something gives you value, be it physical or intellectual, charging for it is in no way "market distortion". There are various distortions that can come into play, but they are exactly the same as with physical goods.
> You might claim that without copyright there would be less "stuff" on the Internet, but there is nothing supporting that.
You really should talk to some musicians. For many, to make a living, they have to work a day job and/or do live shows (which is not an option for many), which takes time that they could instead used to create new stuff. If you searched for threads on this topic on HN, you'll hear this lament frequently from people who actually are musicians. So yes, there is support for that.
> Humans are creative by nature whereas humans would not naturally clean toilets - and thus should be paid for it.
No, humans are not creative by nature, some are. And of those, vanishingly few are good at it. For every billion of amateur artist videos on YouTube, you only get one phenomenon like Bieber(!!)
What humans are, however, is greedy and willing to take advantage of others the moment they think they can get away with it. Ask yourself why we have so many laws.
BTW, do you like coding? In that case, I'd guess your a coder by nature. I know a few MBAs who'd love to get their world changing ideas implemented for free.
> Remove the part where you call people who share their access to information freely "dishonest," and you have simply repeated the childhood moral "knowledge is power" (and "sharing is caring").
I don't really get this point... Are you saying people paying for content are stupid?
And if sharing is caring, why don't you share your bank account details? Just information after all.
> Profiting implies selling, which is not the case with simple/private copying - unless you mean profiting abstractly, as in increased capacity for thought, then yes - and in which case you have paraphrased me well.
I meant selling. Copyright law specifically applies to distribution, not downloading. So you agree "increased capacity of thought" is "profiting"! Wow, that sure sounds like you're deriving value from something, and should maybe, you know, kinda, like, sorta want to pay for that benefit if remuneration was asked for? No? Not the least bit? You just want people to put in labor to create new information so that you can benefit from it without paying? Simply because you can get away with it?
Hmm, I can guess why communism failed.
And going back to tzs' point, pirating Iron Man 3 increases "capacity of thought"? Really?
> It's almost as though the only reason people pay their ISP is for the ability to make copies.
It's almost as if you're deliberately trying to avoid addressing my point that information is more than just bits and making copies can have economic consequences.
My point (that is admittedly not really clear) is that privacy and copyright are just restrictions on what you can do with information. But allow me to address your points in a wall of text nobody will read:
> Privacy is an extension of one's right to be secure in one's body, and free in one's thoughts.
Copyright is an extension of one's right to be paid for the value provided by their labor. Only, in this case, the labor is of an intellectual nature that can be infinitely replicated without recompense. Significantly, each copy of that labor provides substantially the same amount of value regardless of the number of copies, so N copies provides almost N times the value. I don't understand the argument that the remuneration for that value should be anything other than a function of the value provided; anything less than a linear relation looks dangerously, to me, like communism. Not to mention that "Once a work is made, why should anyone pay for it again beyond the cost of transcription?" is a direct corollary to the "you should get an A for effort!" fallacy.
> It is non-transferrable. Disclosure is boolean: it was either voluntary, in which case it does not impose any obligations on those who would reason about it (and copy it, and...), or it was involuntary, in which case it is damage (as in the case of NSA spying). Money doesn't enter into it.
Two things:
1. Copyright has to be transferable else its economic value would be severely restricted.
2. Privacy may not be "transferrable" (the term does not really make sense for "privacy"), but it absolutely is tradeable, and it's hardly as boolean as you make it out to be. As Google and Facebook show us so clearly, people will gladly trade their privacy in exchange for services that would otherwise have a monetary cost. So it definitely is tradeable. But is that really "voluntary"? Well, if anyone dug into Microsoft's "Scroogled" campaign, it was inspired by a survey where the surprising finding was that a large fraction of users did not know that their private information was being mined by Google, and a significant portion of them said did not like it. (I'd like to say the numbers were 45% and 70% respectively, but I can't be sure.) Now: Is that voluntary? What if they didn't know, but did not mind; is that voluntary? What if they knew and didn't mind, but hadn't considered the implications; would you call uninformed decisions like that voluntary?
3. And that's also a clear example that privacy is, in fact, monetizable, so money certainly enters into it.
> Copyright is a government-granted monopoly, it is typically transferable, and it typically imposes obligations even when licensed.
Just like money is a government-granted monopoly on a unique serial number. It's not licensed, but it does impose obligations on whoever owns a hard copy at the moment (no copies).
> It is about monetizing copies at the expense of free expression and thought, and that expense can be bought, sold, in any measure, at the discretion of the holder. It is intended to be a tool to meter out copies for as much remuneration as possible, not to keep them to one's self forever with no intention of ever monetizing them.
Yes it is about monetizing copies; or to put it in Psuedo-economical terms, it is about ensuring economic compensation for the value provided by each copy to the consumer. "As much remuneration as possible" would ideally be econ-speak for "what the market will bear", but this does not apply well to copyright because of the severe market distortion that widespread piracy introduces. What you have instead is some portion of honest (or technically unsavvy) consumers paying more to compensate for large number of pirates who derive value without paying for it.
But, no it is not at the expense of free expression and thought.
1. Free thought is not affected at all. Copyright does not stop you from thinking anything. It only stops you from profiting from copies of other people's expression, which is in no way related to restricting what goes on in your head.
2. It only restricts your "free expression" to the extent that your "free expression" exactly matches somebody's copyrighted expression, or aspects thereof. Unlike patents, it is almost impossible that two independently created works will match exactly in any significant aspect.
3. True, some derivative expression is unfairly caught in the copyright web, especially when there is no clear way to extricate the creative aspect from the original work. The one example that I personally lament are Anime Music Videos; there used to be a ton of awesome work with very original and meticulous synchronization of music to completely unrelated videos that suddenly had their audio stripped on Youtube. However, if you look at the bigger picture, almost all copyright infringements are simply copying original works to avoid paying for it, either with money or patience.
4. Even then, tons of derivative work gets through just fine, simply because it makes no economical sense to stamp it out. Literary fanfic is one example.
5. The petabytes of torrents exchanged daily (yes, petabytes in the US alone; look up the numbers) is hardly "free expression and thought". Ponder how many movies/songs/games that is, even if you assume a ridiculously generous 50% of the torrent traffic to be legit. It's just the "expression" of the "thought" that somebody else's work should be had for "free".
The image you seem to have of copyright restricting "free expression and thought" is based on a focus on a secondary effect of copyright laws that is actually a very small edge case in reality.
Wow, amongst other things, that makes a good case for giving law enforcement agencies direct access to our private information. You're right: why have "second hand testimony" if you can get it firsthand? After all, the NSA is only making copies of all our information, so we are not deprived of anything either.