Doesn't seem very loving to me if I explicitly state I don't want you to copy my work and then you go ahead and do it against my wishes. This appeal to emotion argument is quaint, but nonsense.
And how exactly do you plan to stop people copying your work? Short of locking down the internet this activity is not preventable. If you don't want people copying your work, don't publish your work. Keep it locked up in a safe and never let it see the light of day. You can smile knowing you've created a masterpiece that nobody will tarnish it by consuming it and spreading it throughout the world.
Seriously, though, this isn't about an appeal to emotion, it's about facing the realities of today's connected world. Information can now be replicated at zero cost. Therefore, it has zero monetary value. If you want to feed yourself, perhaps you should either come up with clever new ways of monetizing your artistic talents, or make physical widgets that do have scarcity (and hope to God 3D printers don't become more sophisticated).
"Information can now be replicated at zero cost. Therefore, it has zero monetary value."
This is not as obvious to me as it seems to be to you. Some things have monetary value because of convention. For example, money. These days money is just information, although there is still a little cash in circulation. What if I figure out a way, at "zero cost", to move information around such that your bank thinks that the money in your account is now in my account? The only things stopping me are laws, technical barriers involving cryptographic safeguards, and not being a thief. Why can't society decide, in the interests of fostering creativity, to erect these mechanisms for music, novels, and movies?
Because in order to erect mechanisms for preventing the spread of information, we must be willing to destroy the value that the internet provides in the first place. Protecting money, even if only represented as information, does not require we lock down the internet.
Anyways, perhaps you're inadvertently arguing in favor of a gold backed dollar?
"we must be willing to destroy the value that the internet provides in the first place."
I don't see why that's necessarily so.
"Protecting money, even if only represented as information, does not require we lock down the internet."
I'm not sure I'm following you. Having rules and conventions about how information is treated on the internet doesn't mean that the internet is destroyed. We have rules of the road, but we still have roads.
"perhaps you're inadvertently arguing in favor of a gold backed dollar?"
You're going from "destroy" to "reducing the openness"? I don't claim to have a solution that doesn't somehow "reduce the openness", or, in other words, apply some rules or mechanisms that are not in place now. I'm not interested in destroying or even significantly hampering the internet. But I also don't want the internet to destroy the ability of people to make a living from their creative work.
Reducing the openness of the internet is synonymous with destroying it. To stop piracy altogether, I believe the value of the internet would need to be completely destroyed, yes.
> I'm not interested in destroying or even significantly hampering the internet. But I also don't want the internet to destroy the ability of people to make a living from their creative work.
You do realize that it has always been very difficult for artists to make a living off their work. So difficult, in fact, that the vast majority do their art in their spare time and work other jobs to stay afloat, and that has been the case long before piracy existed.
I would argue that with the advent of the internet, and yes, file sharing (illegal or otherwise) has actually made it possible for more people to make a living off their art than could before these systems were in place. What you seem to be in favor of is protecting a very small number of people - namely signed, popular artists - while hurting the majority of other artists, people who share art, and the internet itself.
