There's an old joke that I used to hear occasionally on British television shows: "It's not theft--it's socialism!" I couldn't help but think of it repeatedly as I read this paper on self-organizing institutional arrangements among pirates, which bears some disturbing similarities to an hours-long anarcho-capitalist bull session.
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I think we need a new term for piracy to differentiate it from the more common usage meaning "dissemination of intellectual property without permission."
Unless you call it "buccaneering" or something, I end up assuming it's about Napster.
Ugh...I really want to read that paper, but it takes me straight to the bad old days when I parsed numerous Social Sciences papers as background for my research projects. Numerous words, many interesting; many ideas, some interesting; and all in desperate need of a merciless editor to limit the former to convey only the best of the latter.
Real Property has the following feature (like money) -- if it is taken/ stolen/ pirated, the original owner doesn't have it anymore.
This loss is what justifies force to stop the loss.
Intellectual Monopoly Rights, monopoly not property, is all about the monopolists using gov't force to stop copying. Copying increases the wealth of the world, altho it can play havoc with the prior business model (the one that financed the creation of the work).
Innovation is not a worthy enough goal to justify violence against sharing folk.
Michael T Sweeney - I think we need a new term for copying intellectual property, myself. For that matter, "intellectual property" tends to group some rather disparate things.