Not by suppressing freedom to download, or by penalizing consumers who download, or by asking them to behave properly. I never said artists should release their music for free. You did not read properly.
Please can you explain what your point is then, I don't quite understand what you're saying if that is the case.
> Not by suppressing freedom to download, or by penalizing consumers who download, or by asking them to behave properly.
You mean the freedom to take a product without doing whatever the person licensed to distribute it wants (eg: pay $10) like we have to do with every other product?
If it costs $10 a ticket to watch on a big screen, spend gasoline, travel some distance physically, it can surely cost 1/10th (or less) of that amount per movie and yet return similar profits (by volumes) to the artist. People really don't care about the middlemen.
Just a few ideas, but obviously the solution is hard. Yet I believe that teaching manners to people, i.e. annoying the consumers is suicidal.
A comparable example would be if I posted this on my blog behind a pay wall (which meant it cost $5 to access the post) and then someone copy and pasted my post here and you read my post while understanding it had been taken from behind my pay wall. That would be absolutely unacceptable.
Is it unacceptable to remember something you've read? To tell a friend? To write down and sell it? If you turn a profit? If you don't? If you write by hand, 1 character per second? If you use a machine to do it, 1 million characters per second? Are we allowed to quote? To teach? To paraphrase? To back up?
These are hard questions, and you're reducing them to moral absolutes. Make your case without shouting about how you're right.
The general idea is (in my opinion) that if you produce something then you should (to a degree) have the expectation of control over the consumption of whatever it is you produce. This includes the right to sell that production, distribute it for free, license that production out to specific groups or keep that production completely private.
If we stick with the example of me writing a post behind a pay wall then I would personally believe that summarising the post to a friend is acceptable as would be posting a summary of the article on HN, because the value of a blog post is not the general idea it's the way in which that idea is presented and formed.
If you were to take the post and reproduce the content in any form (for profit or not) I would believe that to be unacceptable. However there are gray areas which include people who could read a post and then repeat it perfectly. This is something that can't be included in some big flow chart of right and wrong, but it doesn't need to be if everyone stuck to core principles.
I think it can be reduced to a general idea with ease: Taking something (regardless of deprivation) is wrong.
> Make your case without shouting about how you're right.
Regarding this I apologise, I have very little ability to explain my thoughts coherently (failed highschool etc etc) so while I try to explain myself without letting my frustrations leak in it often happens. I spend a lot of time retroactively editing my comments to try and reduce the amount of that, but I often end up not being able to see my comments problems when looking back -- things like assuming my thoughts are the way everyone thinks etc.
Why?
That's not a very progressive spirit. It might seem unfair, but technology has changed the rules of the game. The consumption of many goods has become non-rivalrous.
Whereas taking goods off shelves without paying is covered by other laws, copyright is about forbidding you from sharing what you bought with others who didn't buy it. That's much more debatable.
Reducing this issue to "let's do what we do with every other product" would undo some of the achievements of the technology and hold us back. Copyright has to stand on its own, it can't be justified by analogy to rivalrous goods.
You're right when you say: "copyright is about forbidding you from sharing what you bought with others who didn't buy it. That's much more debatable." But most people who talk about these issues don't realize that all of these things have been debated for a long time. Most people don't add anything new to the discussion, and are woefully ignorant of the thought that's already been put in.
Sources: Read, for example, Eric Flint's writing on the subject http://www.ericflint.net/index.php/2011/09/26/salvos-against...
With your line of argument, what changes can happen? What is new?
Instead, feel free to make your point. I pointed to an article and made a very specific case - the issues people talk about today, and think are unique to our time because of technology, are not unique, and have been discussed before our time. As proof, I linked to an article which has excerpts from talks given during the 1800's.
I'm still unsure what case you're trying to make, and whether you agree or not that my statements were correct.