I would say here that morality has other aspects besides ownership. I would say fraud such as counterfeiting, forgery, and impersonation are not forms of theft, but are wrong because they are forms of deceit.

So it's bad to buy a copy of a movie that's been burned to disk, but magnetic links to torrent files to the same movie paid by advertising is all good?
What if I was to download The Avengers from Pirate Bay, burn hundreds of copies, and do a maildrop with them to advertise a business? Hey, that could be a great marketing opportunity for the Pirate Party to promote itself!

I totally agree that there shouldn't be a double standard here.

I can take "Free software" and charge as much as I like, or use free copies to promote my business, and I don't owe one red cent to the original developers. And under this model the Free Software / Open Source software community is absolutely thriving by almost any metric.

BUT other people in the Pirate Party still insist that if someone finds a way to add value so that others pay something more than the same content being freely shared elsewhere, then some of that profit should be offered back to the original content creator. So the question is, where is that profit 'because' of the content, and where is it not?

youtube make money fairly directly from the content which is hosted on their servers, and have a very good arrangement for sharing that profit with the copyright holders.

The pirate bay doesn't host any content, but has a business model of helping people find it.

The google search engine helps people find what they're looking for, and while not as targeted as TPB sometimes that will be copyrighted content in various forms. http://www.thepirategoogle.com/

Sites like imbd or rotten tomatoes provide reviews of movies and make money from that. Should they also pay some sort of tithing to the movie industry?

Xtra make money from providing internet connectivity. On average quite a lot of this internet connectivity will be used to share copyrighted material, but there are also customers who use large amounts of internet without ever sharing music or movies. Is it fair to tax all internet users on an assumption?

Stationary warehouse sell blank DVD's and USB drives. How about we tax those too?

Hell, why don't we just tax everyone and set up a welfare system for poor, starving artists?

The kernel of a good idea there. But I would not tax people but set a tax on the use of public goods for commercial purposes.

Guaranteeing artists of all types a small but liveable income would bring benefits to the country that far outweigh a few decimal points on the GDP.

It could be the start of an universal unconditional income.

Andrew

PPNZ doesn't like NZ On Air?

Everything in moderation. A little tax money well spent on quality local content is fine. A welfare system for starving artists probably not so much.

I'm not entirely against the idea of a universal unconditional income, something like http://www.bigkahuna.org.nz/ .. but I don't see how this sort of tax would make any progress towards that.

You missed the context. I'm saying I think file sharers were objecting to media companies because the media companies were using deceit, not because they were accusing media companies of 'violating intellectual property rights', so I don't see any hypocrisy here as you seem to imply. i.e. The file sharers are not, as far as I can see, accusing the media companies of doing something that the file sharers are doing themselves.

I don't think there's a moral case against this--so as long as the there is no deceit involved--except in so far as there is a law against it, and social contract binds us to act within the law. Here, I believe that is the case, however while I think social contract can reasonably place restrictions on our public and commercial activities, I don't think it can reasonably place much restriction on our private lives.

I think it's more about the form of the tax here. Tax designed to advance the public good is fine, but not a feudal era style protection racket.

The Big Kahuna idea looks like a mashup of Milton Freedman's flat tax system with negative income tax for low/non earners. A good idea ignored by most of his adherents. I would personally prefer to see a progressive consumption tax rather than a flat income tax, as it would curb excessive spending at the 1% level.
A tax based on use of copyrighted material would be one way to redistribute the enormous wealth made by the few top artists to the many struggling at the bottom of the pile.

Andrew

That's the only point I agree with, it is too obtrusive to regulate what happens in the privacy of your home. Paying an ISP for bandwidth to trade commercial media with other people who pay their ISPs for the bandwidth, perhaps facilitated by a website selling advertising space, is not done in the privacy of your home and involves profiteering from different parties clipping the ticket each step of the way.