No, I am asking you to explain the difference between apple pie the good, and apple pie the intellectual idea. Can you do that?
How about this argument:
Money is a way to store value creation, just like I can store my value creation and hard work by writing a book. Therefore, copying a book takes away from me my beneficial rights to my intellectual work.
Ask them why they arn’t paying royalties to the people who invented money or their heirs.
Well if I broke into your house and copied it, that would be theft.
But if you distributed your book, and people you haven’t made contracts with get a copy of it, there’s no moral problem.
IP rights are really difficult to enforce anyway. It is likely that a free market would have none/minimal IP rights since the cost of enforcing them outweighs the benefits gained by doing so. Of course, in the status quo they are enforced out the wazoo because costs are externalized…
Out of curiosity, what if the person who acquired that book then sold the book without any edits whatsoever, except changed the author name to their own and sold the book in a digital format instead? Would you consider that to be fraud? If you answer yes, and you believe IP is completely invalid, how would it be fraud?
Sure
Because its a lie.
I’d have to enquire as to what the claim to authorship entails.
Definitely not. Fraud has to do with promising a product to someone, and then not delivering it or delivering a far inferior product. Telling someone you wrote a book that you did not write in no way affects the quality of the product.
Fraud is not the same as lying about a product. If I sell you a statue, and tell you that it was gold plated, when in reality it is solid gold, would you consider that fraud?
If you sell a CD to a customer under a contract that prohibits him from copying it, and the customer violates this contract and uploads the file to a torrent website, should I be allowed to download it?
Yes.
Isn’t it amazing what property can solve.
Right. In the above example it would also be fraud.
Well sure, if you violate a contract you have made with someone over IP you are liable within the terms of that contract. Its just that nothing can be said for IP a priori, but in real life people can agree to whatever rules they want.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fraud “deceit, trickery, sharp practice, or breach of confidence, perpetrated for profit or to gain some unfair or dishonest advantage.” So how exactly did I profit or gain some unfair or dishonest advantage by giving you more for your money?
By above example I meant the thing where you put your name on a book you didnt write and try to pass it off as your own.
So how exactly did I profit or gain some unfair or dishonest advantage by selling you a book I claimed I wrote that I did not write? Did you not get a book?
It is fraud to try and claim you wrote a book you didn’t. And it is fraud to tell someone they are buying a gold plated statue when it is entirely gold.
Yeah but if I ever wanted to do anything related to the true author of the book, like attend a lecture or send a letter, or buy another book by the same author, i wouldn’t be able to.
I think most people value knowing the true author of the book for this reason…
It is fraud only if the customer paid more for it than they would have if you had not lied.
I would agree that if you paid more for the book because he claimed to be the author than you would have otherwise done is fraud.