"Technically, it's more akin to counterfeiting, where the reproduction of a work degrades the value of all the legitimate copies, whose chief value lies in their rarity..."

Are you kidding me? So are you saying that if I have 10,000 copies of a single song on my hard drive, whether I legally own them or not, that the value of everyone else's song goes down? Or that songs that are owned by only a few people are more 'valuable' than those owned by millions of people?

Counterfeiting is hardly anything at all like copying music or digital goods. The nature of legal currency (banknotes, coins, etc) is that each portion of it (e.g. a dollar) represents a quantity of value that is diluted, or decreased, when more of it is created. The value of an individual song does NOT go down based upon its relative plentifulness.

The problem with copying is the destruction of opportunity; e.g. the music industry's opportunity to profit is in part destroyed when someone infringes copyright and distributes copies of a song illegally. Therefore the music industry suffers an opportunity cost each time this happens.

If you are going to post and criticise the author as writing rubbish, please make sure that your post isn't also rubbish.

Nicholas King

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