If Mike had said what you said, that would have been fine (except where you used the word “prove” again). However, I think that is a given anyway. People will always do things regardless of incentive or consequence. But let us look, once more, at Mike’s statement:

The idea that things like The Pirate Bay needs to be stopped or there won’t be incentives to create are pretty much disproved right here.

Now, I have no idea what Mike meant when he wrote this, but I interpret this statement to mean “The same amount of incentive will exist with Pirate Bay as currently exists under the current system.” I take this sentence to mean this because Mike would only trumpet this author’s statements as “proof” of anything if they supported comparable amounts of incentive.

The problem is that the author’s statements are meaningless. If we have X authors incentivized to create under the current system, then any replacement system should consider whether a societally useful number of authors are incentivized under that replacement system. Let us call the “societally useful number” Y.

Now, we do know the number of authors X, because we can measure that number. What we do not know a priori is what Y might be. Y might be greater or lesser than X, but without additional information, we do not know.

Okay, we now have a single data point, a supposedly well known and prolific author (whom I have never heard of) stating that Pirate Bay is okay. Given the tens of thousands of authors in the world, we have to ask what the confidence level is that the words of a single author (or even 100 authors) is substantially representative of the total number of authors X. Since we know that there are somewhere around 200,000 different books published each year in the United States, and since most of those books are by unique authors, in order for there to be evidence or proof that Pirate Bay, or any other similar entity, will either harm or not harm creation of new books, we would need a random sample of the authors of those 200,000 books.

Lars was hardly a random sample, and hardly significant. Let us say that we have the voices of 50 authors, but they are clearly non-random voice. If X = 150,000 (assuming that 50,000 books are written by authors represented in the 150,000), and 50 of those authors have stated that their incentive to create is unaffected by Pirate Bay, that leaves 99.97% of all authors without a voice.

Logically, we can only conclude that the true number of authors who would be disincentivized to create with the existence of Pirate Bay is between 0.03% and 99.97%. This knowledge is the limit of what we can conclude because the authors making the comment regarding Pirate Bay are non-randomly chosen and, as we have seen from other surveys, might not provide the same answer depending on how the question is asked and whether the answer is being made public.

So, what does the existence of a few “well known and prolific” authors stating that they are unworried about Pirate Bay mean? Well, all we can conclude is that at least one person (or 50 in our example) would still write even with the existence of Pirate Bay. However, this conclusion does not give us any proof that the societally optimal level of incentivization has been reached with Pirate Bay, or that it would not be reached. In fact, it is extremely dangerous to make any kind of conclusion with such limited data.

The reason it is dangerous to make such a conclusion is because of the massive number of examples we have elsewhere for activities where regulation and behavior appear uninfluenced by each other. For example, we know it is stupid to text while driving. There is evidence that indicates that the odds of having an accident are higher while texting than being at a blood alcohol level of 0.08%. There are laws against reckless driving, which certainly texting should cause. Yet, people continue to text, and people continue to die while texting, often in single car accidents. Thus, people will continue to behave in a destructive manner regardless of the incentivization to not behave destructively, even when the incentivization can be internalized such as the continuation of your life.

So, just because someone will still be “incentivized” to create with the existence of Pirate Bay does not prove that the existence of such sites leads to a socially optimal level of incentivization, or that it would not. All it proves is, once again, that some people, sometimes very few people, sometimes more, will continue to do what they have always done in the face of regulation and limitations, and regardless of whether the behavior is self-destructive.

Once again, this author’s statement are not proof of anything, except we know that one author will continue to write even with the existence of Pirate Bay, even if that author is uncompensated in any meaningful way. If our goal is to prove that people may behave in a potentially self-destructive fashion without understanding the consequences, then we have proof. Otherwise, we have nothing.