In response to Nick Bradbury's post on piracy, Aaron Swartz writes:

Nick has no innate right to have people pay for his software, just as I have no right to ask people to pay for use of my name.

Even if he did, most people who pirate his software probably would never use it anyway, so they aren't costing him any money and they're providing him with free advertising.

And of course it makes sense that lots of people who see some interesting new program available for free from a site they're already at will download it and try it out once, just as more people will read an article I wrote in the New York Times than on my weblog.

And what's this nonsense about warez sites only having shareware stuff and not stuff from Microsoft. In my experience with the biggest, easiest-to-use things, the opposite is true (tons of BigCo software, very little shareware).

And while it's true that EXEs can often do anything (because modern OSes don't have basic security protections like chroot, which has been in UNIX for decades), this is true of all software not just warez.

Yes, piracy probably does take some sales away from Nick, but I doubt it's very many. If Nick wants to sell more software, maybe he should start by not screaming at his potential customers. What's next? Yelling at people who use his software on friends computers? Or at the library?

Aaron then wrote these series of comments in response to Schoolblog's post that agrees with Nick's view:

Chris is arguing what’s known as the sweat-of-the-brow theory of intellectual monopolies: someone who puts work into something deserves to control how it is used.

Taken to its extreme, this probably results in things you disagree with. (Michael Jackson has put a lot of money and work into his face. Can he charge people who distribute pictures of it? A newspaper reporter puts a lot of work into discovering a story. Can he charge people who repeat it.) And certainly, in the specific case of copyright, if Chris’s world was in place we’d have no libraries or video stores, and all the books at bookstores would be shrink-wrapped or behind glass.

By Nick’s reasoning, everyone who rents a movie from a video store or takes a book out of the library is a pirate, because they cost the author one potential sale (in the US, authors don’t get paid anything for library or video store rentals).

Chris, do you feel authors have a right to keep their book out of libraries? They worked hard on their book, shouldn’t they get to make the terms of use? If you don’t, how do you distinguish libraries from downloads? (It’s true that libraries don’t usually involve copies, but this is a practical distinction — quibbles like that don’t see like they’d interfere with a strong right.)

I spend months researching an important story. Finally, after great lengths, I confirm that Nixon’s team funded Watergate break-in, and I provide a chain of evidence to prove it. You run a rival newspaper and you verify all the evidence with your own eyes. Can you publish the story as well? I put a lot of work into that story, I don’t want you to copy it, even if you give me credit.

The fact that video rental stores are legal while peer-to-peer systems aren’t is an accident of law and technology. The law regulated copying while the computer systems required copies to do everything. If we had built our networks with superfast pnuematic tubes instead of wires, we could whisk CDs across them to share with others without violating the law at all. It’s hard to believe one system could be moral and the other not, simply because of this technological accident.

The fact is that there is no such morality behind copyright. Copyright is a recent invention, which originally only touched commercial publishers (of which there aren’t very many). This idea of their being some moral reason for it is even more recent. You won’t find it in any religion, or any old culture. It’s a silly idea, and it goes against our nature to share and build upon each other’s work.

What’s the moral problem with me downloading Nick’s software when there was no chance of me buying it? I get the software, Nick doesn’t lose any money and possibly gets some free advertising. It seems everyone is better off; how could this be immoral?

Yup.  That's how smart kids of 21st century thinks.  What a shame.

Aside from the lost profit and firmness of the moral ground piracy stands on, piracy undermines the soul of our young.  When you do something others consider bad, you start a ball of self-justification rolling so you can sleep at night.  So what if I burnt a house down?  No one got hurt!

Let this bullshit go on and, before you know it, the only acceptable answer to “Why can't I drive your car when you are not using it?“ will be an Uzi.