Exactly how is the assertion that restricting free expression impedes creativity counterintuitive?

What colour is the sky in this guy’s world, in which restricting creativity doesn’t result in less creativity?

Is that what happened to Broadway? As I walked down that dark deserted street, I wondered what could have happened that forced all of the theaters to close.

But now I know. It was the Internet Pirates! Internet Piracy killed Broadway!

Plays can’t compete with Pirates. They can only be about Pirates (of Penzance).

But, they can’t even be about the Pirates of Penzance anymore, because the Pirates of the Internet killed theater, and Shakespeare!

Funny, I thought Shakespeare’s business model had a lot more to do with royal patronage than selling tickets. Scarcity or not, making a living off theatre tickets alone is pretty tough to do, and that’s one thing I *don’t* think has changed in the last 400 years.

I’d say Shapiro’s assumption about Shakespeare’s revenue model is specious even before all the BS about “cultural paywalls”.

Where are the arguments about the “ethics of piracy?”

I understand that some people make this argument but if Shakespeare was a copier, what does that say about any other created art?

Mr. Friedman’s critique boils down to two points.

First, intellectual property is not property. He defines property as tangibles, so if something is not tangible it is not property.

Second, If copyright law (and likely patent law as well) does not “promote progress”, but rather hinders it, then the law is unconstitutional.

For whatever it may be worth, our federal judiciary disagrees with his two points.

Property is a social construct embodied in our laws. Apparently Mr. Friedman does not agree with this social construct.

“Promote progress” he views as a substantive limitation on Congressional power under Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US Constitution. Quite frankly, I am aware of no caselaw at any level of the federal judiciary that has so held. Quite the opposite, though in the interest of full disclosure this is an issue that has been repeatedly been made in dicta, and not as a specific holding determining the outcome of a case before our federal courts.

Of passing interest is that I have never seen an article published by Mr. Friedman addressing trade secrets and if he believes they constitute property. By his definition it seems logical he would not view them as such, which, of course, would represent a departure from rulings by the Supreme Court in cases including, inter alia, Ruckelshaus v. Monsanto. This is one area of the law where I am in the distinct minority because I happen to believe they are not property for reasons totally unrelated to the tangible versus intangible distinction.

The argument being made here, at least if one traces the links back to their origin, is that somehow pirating of music doesn’t directly lead to decreased sales. To make this argument a lot of logical hoop jumping is required to explain the statistics which show a concomitant drop in cd sales to the increased number of connections to sites like bit torrent.

It reminds me of those who tried for decades to make excuses for the connection between cigarette smoking and the incidence of cancer. It just had to be something other than the fags.

Maintain your illusion as long as you can if it gets you through the day. Piracy hurts sales. Yes it can have the upside of getting you noticed, but until authors find a way of filling stadiums with paying customers, that notoriety won’t pay the heating bill.

J.k Rowling has managed to survive even though she has ripped off quite a few things from the tv show ‘the worst witch’ I used to watch when I was younger.

Anyway, no one knows who wrote the works of Shakespeare. It is more than likely that they were written by an aristocrat with a huge private income, so ticket sales would have been the last thing on his mind. Practically all notable pre-copyright art/literature is either written by people who didn’t need to make a living or who had wealthy patrons who didn’t need to make a living. Today we have a different social structure – not just rich people with lots of time and education and poor people with no time and no education, but lots of middle-class people with education but not much time – just enough to produce a lot of amateur stuff (a.k.a. the Internet).