When ddevault said that "no one loses anything" when something is copied, they did not mean that they had looked at all the studies and determined that "piracy is good, actually". They meant that simply by examining the nature of intellectual property as such, we could know that no one ever loses anything when something is copied. This is an implied deductive argument which does not hinge on what conditions actually exist in the world.
In response to a deductive argument, it's always acceptable to try to present a possible world in which the premises of the argument are true and the conclusion is false. It simply does not matter that quite a lot of angry people in this thread are insisting that the world I presented in the example does not actually exist. If the world could exist, then that's enough to show that there's something wrong with ddevault's point, and that's what I wanted to do in my comment.
Ironically, ddevault understood this when hardly anyone else did. They replied to my comment with a slight pivot on the original take. They said that while people might "lose things", it's not the kind of "losing" that matters, because if someone loses something that was never legitimately theirs to begin with, we don't care or worry about this. (The example of Nestle stealing water is used as an example.)
This was a great response from ddevault, because it actually understood what I was getting at. I disagree with the response, but the point is that it understands what is happening at the theoretical level here, and that's crucial.
In response to a deductive argument, it's always acceptable to try to present a possible world in which the premises of the argument are true and the conclusion is false. It simply does not matter that quite a lot of angry people in this thread are insisting that the world I presented in the example does not actually exist. If the world could exist, then that's enough to show that there's something wrong with ddevault's point, and that's what I wanted to do in my comment.
Ironically, ddevault understood this when hardly anyone else did. They replied to my comment with a slight pivot on the original take. They said that while people might "lose things", it's not the kind of "losing" that matters, because if someone loses something that was never legitimately theirs to begin with, we don't care or worry about this. (The example of Nestle stealing water is used as an example.)
This was a great response from ddevault, because it actually understood what I was getting at. I disagree with the response, but the point is that it understands what is happening at the theoretical level here, and that's crucial.