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By reading anything I have ever written, you tacitly agree that for the rest of your life you will never respect copyright law ever again.
Patent law is still optional. Trademark is alright. But fuck copyright in particular.
And I'm specifying copyright law instead of saying "intellectual property" not only to leave others off the hook, but mainly because...

There is no such thing as Intellectual Property Law

The so called "IP" commonly used in discourse is legally meaningless, it doesn't come from any particular law. The term is used to refer, as a whole, to multiple laws: patent, copyright and trademark law. Sometimes it also includes trade secrets and other concepts not protected by any laws.
The layman might see this as a reasonable grouping, but these laws have little in common. Patent and copyright might appear similar if you squint, but trademark has nothing to do with either of them - they were each made for different ends and use different means to achieve them (that's why they are separate laws in the first place).
I'll start differentiating patent from copyright since these are the easiest to get mixed up, and leave trademark for last.

Patent law deals with ideas and inventions, practical utilities with practical use in the real world. There's a process of registration for a patent to become valid and it involves showing that it is indeed a new invention and disclosing the steps necessary to recreate it.
The written purpose of Patent law is to foster scientific development by discouraging the secrecy of useful inventions; it is preferable that an invention be disclosed and then monopolized for a limited period of time (20 years) instead of it being permanently kept as a trade secret.

Contrast that with Copyright law, which is automatically applied to any artistic work with no registration process and has a variable duration with a minimum of 75 years that can go for well over a century if you're unlucky. The only other difference, besides being much more lax in its requirements for validity (especially in what qualifies as "original"), is that Copyright deals with expressions of ideas, rather than ideas themselves.
This means that if someone were to write a book detailing the workings of a new machine and how it can revolutionize an industry, but failed to register a patent, he'd have copyright over that book and nobody would be allowed to reproduce it without permission, but there would be no restrictions in following its instructions to build the machine it describes.
The idea that copyright exists to foster creativity by letting authors make money from their art is demonstrably false, as I will show further down.

The purpose of trademark law, on the other hand, is to protect the customer, not companies or other parties.
Selling something under false pretenses, like saying it was produced by a company that had nothing to do with it, is a type of fraud and that's the crime trademark intends to combat. When this sort of fraud happens, the victim is the buyer who has deceived, not the company that was impersonated. Fraud is notoriously difficult to prove because it must be proven that there was indeed an intention to defraud someone, as opposed to be supposed-fraudster just being an ignorant motherfucker. To facilitate that, trademarks are imprinted on products - branded on them, if you will - to identify the vendor, like having a brand name on your clothes so customers know which company made that. Companies can sue for trademark infringement if someone is using their trademark in a way that could be confusing for customers - basically a preventive measure against potential fraud.
there's also trademark dilution[1] that is kinda bullshit tbh but i dont really care

Other than that, Trademark law puts no restriction on the use of trademarks. That means that you are free to use the name Coca-Cola™ to talk shit about them online without having to ask for permission to use that word, but you cannot use their name to pretend to be an official representative.
Trademarks regularly have logos and symbols associated with them, but those are always copyrighted, so you aren't free to use them however you please. In that case, it's Copyright law fucking you over, not Trademark. So no, abolishing Copyright wouldn't suddenly legalize plagiarism, fraud would still be illegal.

Oh, by the way, despite the corporate propaganda always insisting that getting a copy of a copyrighted file from a friend is literally theft...

The Law does NOT consider sharing the same as theft

If you torrent a movie and get caught, you will be charged with copyright infringement, possibly unauthorized distribution, maybe even contempt of The Mouse©. What you will not be charged with is true, honest-to-god theft.

Subversive Language

As you can see, the requirements for something to fall under copyright is incredibly more lax than the other two, which is why IP is almost synonymous with the copyright itself for the simple fact that copyright is a lot more ubiquitous than the others. But if when people say "intellectual property" they really mean "copyrighted work" 99% of the time, why not simply say "copyright" instead?
Or use the proper word for being talked about (patent, trademark) instead of using the vague term "IP"?

It's not because it rolls off the tongue better. Putting all those disparate laws under the same umbrella term of "Intellectual Property" is a sham just like calling copyright infringement "piracy" or "theft"[2]: nothing but an attempt to control public discourse.
By using those idioms, publishers force any discussion to be had on their terms, where it is presupposed that ideas and concepts are analogous to physical objects[3].
Other words from corporatespeak seeping into the common language to drag people into their way of thinking are content and consumer. "Content" by itself isn't particularly bad as it only trivializes the works of authors and refers to them in aggregate as if they are commodities (which says a lot about how they think), but it enables the more insidious word "consumer", and it furthers stretches the use of "theft" due to the implication that something is being used up, therefore losing it's utility and causing some sort of loss.

Using the vocabulary set by the publishers means that, even if you notice that unauthorised acquisition of intellectual property doesn't viscerally feel the same way that theft does[4] and try to question it, you are granting them several hidden assumptions that invariably lead to their conclusion - after all, if ideas are property, then they can be owned, therefore getting access to an idea without the owner's permission is basically theft/trespassing, so doesn't that mean it is automatically wrong?
Imagine having a discussion about age of consent where "sex with anyone under the age of 35" is referred to as "rape"; how are you going to conclude anything other than that it is wrong to have sex with a 34yo or younger?

To have a productive discussion on the subject, you first need to ask whether those assumptions are even correct to begin with.

Is downloading a car the same as stealing it?

Let me begin by explaining the concept of scarcity.
If I steal your book, the book that I gain - that I can now make use of - is the same book that you lost - that you can no longer make use of. Theft has this element of gain versus loss.
The words in your book, however, are a different matter. If I read the same book as you, I will have gained the knowledge within while causing no memory to be lost, and no ink to disappear. I have gained something, and nobody suffered any loss for it.

Some defenders of restricting ideas argue that original, useful ideas (as opposed to their set of duplicates) are scarce because we don't have infinite ideas, but that reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what scarcity means, and it has nothing to do with infinity.

Scarcity has it's origin in goods with rival use: things that cannot be used by two people at the same time. If I am using a pen to write, you cannot use the same pen while I use it - our use is rivalrous[5].
This concept does not apply to ideas and the like. Holding an idea in my mind does not stop anyone else from holding the exact same idea in their mind, knowing how to tie my shoes doesn't stop anyone else from tying their shoes, use of information is non-rivalrous by nature[6]. Likewise, if a radio tower is making a broadcast, everybody can tune in to their frequency to hear them without preventing others from doing the same[7].

There is also the fact that, even if ideas were considered property and getting an idea without permission was wrong, nothing could be done to rectify the event of someone getting an idea without permission. You can kick out a trespasser and you can take an object back from a thief, but once someone knows something, you cannot make then un-know that.
Once someone reads a book, they can't unread it.
Once someone listens to a song, they can't unlisten to it.
Once someone sees a picture, they can't unsee it (no matter how much we all, at some point or another, wished we could).
You have no obligation to share ideas with others, you can keep it to yourself if you want, but once you tell it to someone else you are no longer in sole possession of it, it is now as much his idea as it is yours.
I hope this helps clarify how copying a digital file is as far removed from theft as something can get.

But then comes the next question: if this is all bullshit, then how come this has become such a widespread belief?

The Origin of Copyright

Copyright has existed in official capacity for 3 centuries, by now it is something that is taken from granted and assumed to have always existed, so it is easy to see the written justification for patents and copyright as means to promote progress of science and art by granting exclusive rights to inventors and authors, and be fooled by this framing, but make no mistake - copyright has never been about the author. To understand why that is, we need to follow the origin of modern copyright law back to its roots.

The Great Britain's Statute of Anne, is taken to be the world's first official copyright law, but that's not exactly true. England previously had another law restricting who had the right to copy books, it just didn't have the same sugarcoating as the later law does.

After the invention of the printing press, authors weren't intimidated by it - quite the contrary in fact.
The problem that the government was facing at the time wasn't a sudden lack of new writings, but rather the exact opposite: too much was being written and published. It was now easier than ever to circulate politically dissident material and the Crown wanted to devise a way to shutdown the creation and spread of such material.
Censorship of ideas by authority is nothing new, it's a practice as old as speech itself, what changed with the printing press was the sheer scale of it. A despot could no longer hunt down individual works and authors in an ad-hoc fashion, there was now a need to systematize it.

This systematization happened in 1557, during 5-year-short reign of Queen Mary I. She granted the Company of Stationers of London the exclusive right to print and distribute books[8].
To that end, the Company was given the power to destroy any unregistered printing presses as well as the books distributed by them, and imprison those responsible. The Crown, of course, had a veto on which books the Company accepted into their registry - the entire purpose of their alliance was to turn the Company of Stationers of London into the Book Police of England. And it had all the right incentives to work smoothly for a century and a half because the government didn't have to pay them directly for the censorship they provided since the power granted allowed them to make their own payment.
This is the prototype of copyright law: a group of publishers (not authors) got to make a lot of money with the state-backed right to persecute anyone distributing books they did not permit. The only difference between that and the current law is the breadth and depth: nowadays it applies to much more than books and forbids a lot more than verbatim copies. This old "copy right" may look different from modern copyright because it was for the clear benefit of the printers and the government instead of the authors, but the practical execution remains the same. Publishers (not authors) persecute those who create copies without their express permission.
The current law might be phrased as a protection granted to authors instead of publishers, but as I said before, copyright has never been about the author.

After a full century of absolute monopoly, came the Licensing of the Press Act of 1662 from the English Parliament by order of King Charles II[9]. (I'm gonna keep it real with you, I'm not entire sure what exactly this changed compared to the Royal Chart they already possessed, but) It conferred to the Company of Stationers more or less the same privileges it already possessed, the only difference is that this new Act originally had a limited time of 2 years, that the English Parliament kept renewing until 1692, finally expiring in 1695.
To put things in perspective, the Stationers had enjoyed over a century of absolute monopoly with the heavy hand of the State backing them up. As monopolies tend to do, they became complacent, wholly dependent on it to stay in business. The prospect of having that privilege revoked was an existential threat.

Under the risk of losing their privileged status as sole printers of England, the Company tried to ask for new censorship laws so they could keep their power over the market, but they got rejected.
They then opted for a more indirect strategy: they alleged that authors had a natural right to own their writings, therefore a law should be passed to guarantee this right to authors. Mind you that this new "natural right" was an entirely new fabrication on the part of the Stationers, and they certainly had no problem trampling on this supposedly natural right until their monopoly on printing was revoked.
Nevertheless, this argument managed to convince the Parliament to institute a new type of monopoly over printing, now on the behalf of the writers, resulting in the Copyright Act 1710 (aka the Statute of Anne).
But make no mistake -- copyright is not about the author, it's about the publisher. There was never any movement from authors themselves asking for a newly discovered "natural right" to be protected, it was entirely a publishers' endeavour. They didn't do that out of the goodness of their hearts to the sole benefit of the starving artist; that was a gambit, with the author's right as its artifice.

However poor 18th century communication technology might have been, after a century of centralized control over printing under a singular company, the entire industry remained in relatively close contact. Among themselves, they reasoned that they still held all the power of distributing books, because anyone not affiliated with them was forbidden to own a printing press until very recently, therefore authors could write all they wanted, they would be unable to publish their books by themselves. Only the Stationers' Company and their associates had the equipment and logistics for large-scale printing and distribution, of little matter was the fact that they no longer had absolute dominion over it by royal authority.
From this, they concluded that even if authors held the exclusive right to copy their own books, they could still be forced to sign those rights away if publishers refused to publish otherwise. Forming this cartel after being unified for so long was an easy proposition and, as predicted, publishers still effectively held the right to copy among themselves even with that right being granted to authors instead. All that talk about the natural right of authors was nothing but lip service paid to keep their old monopoly, now with extra steps.
The only thing that changed was that now copyright only applied to new works had a limited duration (as opposed to lasting indefinitely under the Stationers' rule). But the latter is slowly being reverted since the last century.

Such is the origin of copyright. A privately-enforced censorship program that granted a monopoly to a company who became too powerful to have its powers taken away.
Still think this is about the author? The myth of the starving author is exactly that, a myth. Never in the inception of copyright law was any heed paid to the individual creators. If anything, it was always the publishers who were starving the authors by using their overwhelming influence to coerce them to submit to their terms; that's how it was then, that's how it is now.
Copyright is not and has never been about the author, it was always a law made to serve the publishers.

Ownership of ideas was never considered a right in the first place

The implementation of the law itself shows that copyright is not and has never been considered a true natural right, and the most blatant evidence for this comes from the fact that copyright has a time limit. What's more, despite the fact that the duration of copyright keeps expanding to the point that it now lasts longer than the lifespan of the author, it still isn't like physical property. If you die and leave your belongings with someone else, there is no set time when the inheritor will be forced to relinquish your property to the public.
Copyright has a time-limit because, even under the facade of it being to the benefit of the author, it is still understood to be a social contract between authors and the rest of the population, where they are given a monopoly to profit from under the assumption that they will keep a steady flow of creations for society.
If it was understood that authors held a real claim of ownership over their creations then copyright would never expire, and thus, just like with real theft, whether or not you're committing a crime wouldn't change based on the date.

When the American Constitution was being written, there was no illusion that this was a natural right, they instead treated it like a necessary evil to be levied for the sake of an utilitarian public service, as exemplified by the fact that this power to control copying was written under Section 8 of Article 1, alongside other powers such as collecting taxes and maintaining an army[10].
Thomas Jefferson, in particular, recognized the non-rivalrous nature of ideas and how copyright is more like a privilege than a right[11].

Scope Creep

Copyright law has infamously been growing in breadth and depth since it's inception.
While it originally applied only to books, it now applies to a wide variety of works[12]:

1. fiction books
2. non-fiction books
3. picture books
4. etchings
5. maps
6. charts
7. poetry
8. textbooks
9. catalogs
10. compilations
11. adverts
12. sculptures
13. photos
14. drawings
15. movies
16. documentaries
17. cartoons
18. music
19. audio recordings in general, actually
20. screenplays
21. scripts
22. mime performances
23. circus acts
24. dances
25. interviews
26. computer programs
27. databases
28. videogames
29. architecture
30. who knows what the fuck else, the terms are extremely vague

While it originally restricted only the distribution (not the reproduction itself) of direct copies, now it also puts restrictions on[13]:

1. direct copies
2. derivative works (another L for fic writers)
3. distribution of copies
4. public performances
5. public displays
6. transmissions (I'm pretty sure this last one is specifically trying to restrict radio-like streaming of music)

And this massive scope creep happened all at once with the Copyright Act of 1976.

While it originally was concerned only with the copies themselves, it now deals with the means of distribution as well, thanks to the DMCA. So it's no longer just making copies that is illegal, creating the means of making copies is also a criminal offense.
Now we have come full circle, back again to destroying clandestine copying machines alongside their unlawfully made copies.

There's also the increase in geographical reach. Once upon a time, a country's laws were contained within its borders, but Europe hasn't been able to stop itself after it got a taste of colonialism, so now the whole world is brought under the yoke of copyright thanks to the WIPO and Berne Convention. (Unless you live somewhere particularly based)
Furthermore, on top of the economic benefits, international law also came up with the bullshit idea of "moral rights", which gives authors (besides reasonable rights like the right to attribution) the authority to object to any use of his work that he considers damaging to his honor/reputation[14].

And finally the one people like to complain the most about, the duration of american copyright:

1. originally it lasted for 14 years, with the possibility to renew once for 14 more (only if the author was still alive)
2. then the initial duration was increased to 28 years
3. then the renewal was also increased to 28 years, for a maximum duration of 56 years
4. then they just said "fuck it" and made it last until the death of the author + 50 years (this was also part of the 1976 Act), or a flat duration of 75 years if the author is not an individual (like a corporation or anonymous author)
5. then Mickey Mouse's copyright started to get really close to expiring, so Disney politely asked Congress to add 25 more years because 70 simply isn't enough time to milk that rat for every penny it's worth
6. then they finally gave it a rest

Death of the Public Domain

The Public Domain didn't always exist, before the Statute of Ann, the Company of Stationers' had indefinite copyright over every book in England, only after it was dictated that copyright wouldn't apply to old works and that it lasted for a limited time, could the Public Domain be born from the negative space created. Unfortunately, despite all the current hype, back when people could still bear witness to the expiration of the copyright of something created in their lifetime, the public domain was already something rather underwhelming. At the time, copyright was only that, the right to copy - making derivative works was still allowed. With the way copyright is now, forbidding anything too similar to other works, the Public Domain is considered the accumulation of all ideas and expressions of every person who has ever lived, and it is supposed to be the fuel that keeps copyright going, because art is inherently derivative and artists need inspiration.
Creating something always involves taking from multiple sources (life itself or other ideas) and combining to bring something new to existence, this is true both for science and art - no idea has ever been created or is able to exist in a vacuum, new ideas are always built upon previous ideas. As Issac Newton famously said to Hooke in 1675: "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."
By the way, did you know that Newton did not come up with that phrase?
The earliest record of this expression is attributed to Bernard of Chartres by John of Salisbury, who wrote on his Metalogicon in 1159[15][16]:

Fruitur tamen aetas nostra beneficio praecedentis, et saepe plura nouit non suo quidem praecedens ingenio, sed innitens uiribus alienis, et opulenta doctrina patrum. Dicebat Bernardus Carnotensis nos esse quasi nanos gigantum umeris insidentes, ut possimus plura eis et remotiora uidere, non utique proprii uisus acumine, aut eminentia corporis, sed quia in altum subuehimur et extollimur magnitudine gigantea.

Anyway, my point is that the public domain got frozen in time during the 20th century and nowadays it consists entirely of ancient works. This is the year when Steamboat Willy's copyright finally expired. After 95 years.
What this means for the new generation of artists is that, since amateurs first learn to make art by copying others around them, they either have to become criminals by making derivative works of whatever they got exposed to while growing up, or go through the imitative phase of artistic development by copying from works that they have zero emotional attachment to because it was made a century ago.
Empirical evidence[22] shows that they chose the first option, which, may I remind you, is a federal crime because those are derivative works made without asking for the permission of the rightholders.

This fact isn't lost on legislators, at least they had the presence of mind to put some breathing tubes in this ever more smothering law.
With all the new restrictions that copyright apply, the concept of "fair use" had to be cooked up so the entire industry doesn't completely implode from a lack of creative freedom, and organizations such as libraries don't have to pay out of their asses to keep doing the god's work of archiving information for posterity.

Welcome to the Internet

Now that you understand that it exists to the sole benefit of the distributor instead of the author at the expense of the creativity of the rest of the world, I can begin to explain why copyright, if it was ever needed, has already ran its course.

Up until the last century, authors still had to reply on publishers because mass production and distribution of their works was difficult and expensive. On top of the production costs that include raw materials (paper, ink) and equipment (printers), they'd also have to reckon with the logistics and delivery costs of shipping all the produced books to retailers, and marketing costs so that people know to buy the book when it arrives at the store. This at least explains why publishers have always been so intent on asking for exclusive rights to publish something: the business of publishing is extremely expensive and risky, so they need to stack the deck in their own favor to take such a wild gamble.
It was all fine and dandy until some guys in an University decided to connect a wire between 2 computers.

The Personal Computer and the Internet are huge game changers in this environment because now the means of distribution are in the hands of the people. Copyright is a law of publishers by publishers for publishers in a time when they were the only ones capable of spreading media in a large scale, but not anymore.
The printing press was never a household appliance, it was an industrial equipment that required serious resources to operate - only those in the business of printing (or the rich) had possession of a printing press. Compare that to a computer wired to cyberspace, where distribution is nearly instant and copies are produced at negligible costs - any idiot can slap a caption in impact font on a picture and show it to the whole world from the comfort of his bedroom, and indeed many do exactly that on a daily basis.

Now that everybody routinely carries a weapon of mass-creation in their pocket, copyright is no longer a yoke applied only to organizations, it is a yoke applied to every individual.

Outdated Business Model

drinking game: take a shot everytime i say 'business model'
Since the cost to create a new unit of a digital file and distribute is effectively zero, they are not compatible with the business model previously used to distribute physical media.
The traditional way of publishing is to bear the initial costs of creating a new work (say, writing a new book) and then use the distribution of copies to pay for the distribution itself plus the creation and still generate a profit margin. In other words: they use distribution to subsidize creation. This works out fine when there is something to which a profit margin can be added to, but in trying to apply this business model to cyberspace, they are trying to use something gratis to subsidize something with quantifiable costs.
This business model is absurd when applied to digital files.

But do corporations adapt to this new environment? Of course not, just like their ancestors, they have grown fat and complacent with their unchallenged dominion, and when it is threatened, they use the power they accumulated to lobby the government to maintain their privileged position. Time is a flat circle.

And it's not like nobody has realized a new way to get funded; The Internet also brought several miracles that facilitate new ways of doing business. Take crowdfunding for example: it didn't use to be possible for an individual to pay for a large project (game, movie, book, whatever), but now it is possible for a crowd to come together and directly pay for the creation of something, rather than the distribution - be it in a one-off fashion like Kickstarter, or continuous long-term support like Patreon[17]. Distribution no longer needs to be used to fragment the cost among individuals.

Furries have long ago figured out how to make money with drawings. Instead of first producing their scribbles and then looking for buyers, they first find a client and then get paid to draw what they asked.
Doing commissions is the business model that artists have used since time immemorial. Despite inhaling concentrated dust all day, sculptors weren't crazy to the point of spending several months working on a statue only to start looking for a buyer after it is done. Back then, their work was funded by a rich patron who'd request a new opulent decorative piece for their estate, same for painters. Likewise for books, they were either written on request, like an university funding a research, or the writer himself had a use for it.
In fact, this is how great inventions were made before patents: an engineer or a group of them tried to solve a problem only to discover their solution had wide utility for everybody else - the printing press was created to solve of problem of book reproduction being extremely slow and error-prone, not to seek rent from royalties. Still without the restriction of patents, the movable-type printing press improved on the previous design that was still a pain in the ass to use, allowing pages to be made by rearranging letters instead of needing a whole new plate per page. Software used to be the same, the first programmers were hired by organization to write in-house software for their mainframes, and it was extremely common for them to share source code among themselves to improve on each other's works - nobody thought anything of it because selling software to the masses was unheard of[18].
It strikes me as utter insanity that putting the cart before the horse (first creating something and then looking for someone willing to pay for it) is considered the default way to sell digital goods, and that this practice must to be protected under the threat of legal violence.

Indeed, I see the required use of legal violence as proof that the business model is fundamentally broken. We live in a age where sharing media with your friends is a criminal offense. There used to be a time when sharing CDs with your friends and recording TV broadcasts using a DVR were legal activities with precedent in court. What has changed since then if not merely the scale?
Everybody on the Internet is my friend. If back then I could share my stuff with the few people I knew and it was A-OK, why do I now go to jail just because I have 10000 e-friends eager to listen to the latest album I found?

It wasn't always like this.
Until 1997, the law was unconcerned with neighborly sharing as long as it had no commercial end. Then United States v. LaMacchia happened.
It was the prosecution of an MIT student who hosted copyrighted material for anyone to access for free. The court dismissed the case because the law at the time did not punish copyright infringement without a profit motive[19]. Afterwards Congress started to work on the No Electronic Theft Act, which fixed the so-called "LaMacchia Loophole", so now sharing with your fake internet friends is a crime because if you do that they won't give money to companies anymore. And we can't have people dodging their legal obligation to fill The Man's pockets, now, can we?

Here are my two-cent on the situation: sharing is a natural human instinct. Under normal circumstances, when someone likes something, he will share with it other people so they can enjoy it too.
If your business models requires people to exhibit unnatural behavior, the solution isn't to require laws to fix human nature to your benefit, it is to figure out a less retarded business model. It shouldn't up to the government's to make your retarded business model profitable.
Likewise, it shouldn't be up to the people to change their behavior to make sure you're going to make a profit; that's flipping the notion of doing business on its head. Companies don't have an inherent right to profit, if they want the customer's money they need to earn it. And if they aren't making money, then they need to change their strategy to satisfy the customer, not the other way around.

This is why I believe that copyright as a whole needs to be abolished, it only exists to support a failed business model. Yes, several companies might go out of business if that happens and they refuse to adapt, but I have no sympathy for them.
The way I see it, the situation is analogous to slave owners complaining they'll go bankrupt if slavery is abolished: their entire business model depends on a unjustifiable law, therefore they deserve to go to ruin if they refuse to adapt without it.
And I say copyright is unjustifiable because, thanks in great part to the DMCA and the legal sanction of DRM, using the long and heavy arm of the state to punish people for making digital copies has become unenforceable without infringing upon more fundamental rights, such as privacy. I don't care whatever economic benefits DRM is supposed to have, they aren't worth putting Soviet policies back in practice.
And since I'm already talking about it, let me give you a little piece of my mind on DR-fucking-M.

Digital Restrictions Management

god fucking dammit every fucker in the world who puts drm on their shit deserves to be shoved inside a toilet and forced to sing this from start to finish
in their attempts to stop people from sharing, companies decided to seize control over their ppls computers in order to directly remove their ability to generate copies
they say they do this to keep ppl honest, but thats a crock of shit
keeping an honest user honest is like keeping a tall user tall
you aint doing shit, if someone wants to pay for something theyll do it with or without anal rape
and if they dont they wont
its just a pain in the ass of legit customers
actually, scratch that
some ppl might actually avoid paying if they need to get anally raped first
so in all likelihood theyre actually making honest users dishonest
oopsie, imagine that
you punish ppl for giving you money and they dont wanna give you money anymore
no wonder ppl go for the bootleggers
bc drm blocks your freedom to do whatever the fuck you want with your computers
suddenly you cant do what The Man doesnt want you to do
it literally malware except its legalized
but the fact remains that i have no control over it, no fucking idea what its really doing, and i cant modify or remove it
in fact, breaking drm is a crime
and you wanna hear a funny joke?
since drm commonly makes use of encryption in some way to restrict a file or request authentication, that means that figuring out the decryption key to get full access to the file is a crime
and here is the punchline: decryption keys are just numbers
they made numbers illegal ahahahahaha
i wish i was joking, but this is the actual unironic term used "illegal numbers"
and i swear they use this term with a completely straight face
oh and since they are numbers, ppl get really creative in the ways they disseminate them
after all, every encoding ever created is just a number
so look at this flag

not to be confused with the neoplasmatic pastelsexual catgender flag
this is a encryption key for blurays, encoded as colors (09f911 029d74 e35bd8 4156c5 635688 c0)
back in '07 mfs were spamming this shit everywhere just to spite the mpaa
then it got canonized as the freeze peach gender flag, proudly displayed by those who identify as freeze peach
i think this is insanely based and progressive ngl
when the suits come in demanding that ppl stop sharing, they just share even harder and they are powerless to stop them
anyway that number lets you uncuck you player to play any disc you want or whatever idk i stopped using optic media after they invented flash memory tbh
point is, drm has never in the history of ever stopped piracy
bc all it takes is 1 neet with too much time on his hands to crack any given drm and then share the method with the whole wide world for everybody to copy
how ironic that the prohibition of sharing is circumvented by sharing
in fact, i think drm is there just bc ppl in power like to fuck the little people over
bc mass propaganda to make ppl develop a guilt complex over sharing files has done more to stop piracy than drm ever could
drm is ultimately powerless to stop someone who really wants to get something for free
putting worms in the brain of ppl to make them feel bad for doing it is a lot more effective
but above all that, i think computer illiteracy also plays a huge role
the niggercattle just cant into computers and shit anymore
back in the 90s every child could be exposed to napster while surfing the web
but now that everybody is herded into sterile data silos the chances to them learning that they can get files directly from fellow websters instead of going through a middleman are much lower
esp now that everything is done through a middleman
do kids even know what a torrent is anymore?

at least we dont have brainchips (yet)
so matter how awful drm gets, we still have on last bail: the analog hole
sometimes its called analog gap, but hole is funnier
the analog hole refers is the fact that our brain perceives the world through analog signals, so any digital media ultimately needs to be converted to plain analog
that means that even if drm encrypts it, at some point it needs to be decrypted to be able to be shown
and it must be shown in an analog way, where digital restrictions cannot be managed
so even in the worst-case scenario where computers get completely and absolutely cucked out of our control, it will still be possible to use a shitty camcorder from 2002 to create a 240p shaky version of a movie, with muffled audio and background noise and all that good stuff
just like the vintage bootleggers used to make
btw 'analog hole/gap' is subversive language too
bc 'hole/gap' implies that it is a problem to be solved (like loophole), rather than a simple fact that information can be converted back and forth between digital and analog formats
its been done since basically always and nobody saw a problem with it besides the possible loss of data per conversion (like loss of drm)

and then there are the EULAs
christ almighty on a cross, if theres a race of subhumans that deserve to have their balls manually torn off their crotch and pressure cooked and fed to their children are fuckers who write eulas longer than classic russian literature in undecipherable legalese
those licence terms are written in intentionally difficult language so the layperson doesnt know just how much he is getting fucked over
not that anyone reads those fucking bibles anyway
companies know that and thats why they put the most egregious terms possible
like how 100% of the time you arent even buying the thing
youre just buying a permission to access the thing
so its more like a rent than an actual purchase
they even explicitly say that the terms of the licence can be changed at any time for any reason with no prior notice and you dont have a right to complain or ask for refund
and their drm serves as a backdoor on your machine to enforce that whether you like it or not
thats what funimation did when they got merged
thats what sony almost did when warner bros didnt wanna renew their discovery contract
you might be inclined to blame the victim here for signing without reading, but get fucking real
when you buy a videogame you dont wanna sign a 30-page contract to give your soul to satan, you just wanna fucking play
and companies employ psychological tactics to influence you to just accept it and spread your anus
like the fact that you only see the fucking eula AFTER you purchase that shit
so even if you refused, youd have to go through the pain in the ass of asking for a refund
which they of course dont make it easy for you
how can anyone say these practices are morally correct when they are using all these dirty tricks to make the buyer have no idea what he is buying and risking legal action from such misunderstanding
i say, piracy is perfectly justified in this case
better than giving money to conmen anyway

and by the fucking way, its only these """intellectual""" goods that are sold with draconian restrictions
when it comes to physical goods, only with very few of them it is common practice to allow renting and nothing else (houses, cars, what else?)
everything else you actually own when you buy it
and the seller cant control you after you walk out of the shop
they dont try to tell you arent allowed to use your new watch to tell the time to your friends
they dont say you are forced to return the pen you bought if they ever go out of business
they dont put a camera in your house to make sure the couch you bought is only used for sitting and not sleeping
all of these practice would be considered supremely outrageous if vendors of physical goods lobbied for laws that allowed them to do that
but thats the norm with digital products
and there are ppl who defend this shit
the cognitive dissonance is crazy
which means the propaganda is effective
selling licenses instead of the actual product is as scummy a practice as lightbulb manufacturers intentionally making their bulbs have a limited lifespan when they could make them last indefinitely
this sort of rent-seeking is only useful to line the man's pockets to the detriment of everybody else
and if you expect me to finance this, you can suck a steamy fart out of my arse
every cent withheld from publishing companies is a cent they wont use to lobby and litigate to maintain their empire

so i find it pretty fucking absurd that we are expected to be these bastions of morality and avoid getting free shit from one another
while companies can throw morality out the window for the sake of squeezing as much money from us as possible
if they are allowed to fuck us over at every opportunity for a pretty penny, then i say that turnabout is fair play
and besides the main reason ppl go for the pirated stuff is not due to morality or ethics, its due to convenience and pleasure
as much as we like to pretend that humans are rational animals, that makes as much sense as saying we are swimming animals
we are capable of swimming, yes, but its something we only do when its serves a purpose (some madmen also do it for funzies)
truth is, humans are on autopilot mode 90% of the time, operating on instinct and intuition, no different than 'unintelligent' animals
raising a case about morality and ethics against piracy is useless bc pirated media is usually entertainment, so ppl are making decisions based on convenience and pleasure
its the same reason vegan arguments fall flat on normie ears: the decision to eat meat is made by the lizard brain, not the frontal cortex
when we eat meat, we arent thinking 'this is rightful and correct' we are thinking 'yum yum meat taste good', even if we cognitively understand that meat is murder
bc murder tastes hella good
likewise for free software, normalfags dont care about absolute freedom to fuck around with your computer bc they are too incompetent for that so the biggest advantage is a totally immaterial for them
so yea, no point in even preteding that morality has any bearing on the situation here, for either side
if they are willing to play dirty, i dont see why we should go high when they go low
i dont care if piracy is considered an underhanded tactic to even the field
its all in the game yo
im already sick and tired of capitalistic pigs trying to hold me to standards they wont hold themselves to
so fuck copyright, i say, start a copyriot today!

besides, history shows that no retarded law ever got repealed by people calmly and peacefully asking for it
the prohibition of alcohol didnt end when contrabandists and drinkers stopped drinking and went to beg politicians for mercy
it ended bc it was clear nobody was respecting that law, enforcement became impossible, and everybody was complaining all the time
likewise with the gay marriage
faggots werent taking vows of celibacy just bc they werent allowed to marry
they were fucking and sucking and living together already, to the point that legalizing their marriage was just a formality
thankfully infringing copyright is already on the same track
after a whole month of reading up on the subject and seeing several online discussions, im happy to report that every single person i saw arguing against piracy has admitted to having pirated something at some point
they only stopped once they developed a guilt complex over it
but at this point having a guilt complex over doing the most inane shit is the default state of mind of westoids, so thats nothing to worry about
i also get the feeling the even the word 'piracy' itself has lost its stigmatizing connotation
it was meant to be a swear word, but now ppl are proudly calling themselves pirates
prolly under the mentality of 'if sharing is wrong, then i dont wanna be right'
similar to how 'queer' got reclaimed by queers
this is the reason ill keep using pirate normally, unlike other subversive words that i intentionally avoided using
also i just think that being a pirate is awesome tbh
like, remember that 'you wouldnt steal a car' shit?
if they didnt want us pirate stuff, they shouldnt have made it look so cool lmao
so yea, im fairly optimist that piracy will win the political war in the longrun
the government has a terrible track record when it comes to stopping technology from doing its thing
if piracy does lose, i think its more likely to be due to corporate brainwashing than criminal punishment

but like, what the fuck ever, amirite?
forget all i wrote above
forget the history of copyright as a privilege for the publishers
forget companies using a retarded business model incompatible with how the world works now
forget that copyright purports to foster creativity when it actually kills it
forget the myriad of ways we get fucked over for the financial benefit of boomers
forget the discussions about who has the moral high ground on this wh40k battle
forget all of that, nobody in the real world knows any of that shit
you wanna know the real reason the niggercattle engages in piracy?
ITS BECAUSE PIRATES OFFER A BETTER FUCKING PRODUCT BY EVERY METRIC IMAGINABLE

The Pirate Pill

Is it really that hard to understand that people won't buy from you if you punish them for paying while someone else offers the exact same product with superior quality?
DRMd media are simply categorically worse than their pirated counterparts.

Getting a legal copy DRM-riddled garbage means you have to put up with several restrictions on when, where and how you are allowed to use it, on top of the looming possibility of having your access revoked at any moment for any reason because you don't really own anything. And then there's the fact that you are probably buying it online, so you need to enter a lot of personal information to pay for its gouged up price - meaning that you're basically paying to get datamined and having everything leaked within the next few years, as every Big Tech company has proven time and time again to be utterly incompetent when it comes to data security.

Now compare and contrast to getting the exact same media from your friendly neighborhood bootlegger, who gives you full control over the file to copy to whatever devices you want, however many times you want, using whichever program you want, with no built-in mechanism to take the file away from you - you only lose it if you suffer a data loss, and that's on you. And all of those benefits come at the teeny bitsy additional price of $ 0.00, with no need to dox yourself.

But it's not that people just want free shit with no consideration for the creators, what they want is convenience, and they are willing to pay a premium for it.
Back when Netflix was the only game in town when it came to streaming, piracy rates for TV shows ended up seeing a significant drop; it was merely more convenient to pay for one service and not have to go out to look for movies yourself, and the peace of mind of not worrying about the police coming knocking on your door for crimes against The Mouse©, as well as having the good conscience of pay money to something you consider valuable.
That ship has sailed a long time ago, of course, when other companies saw Netflix making big bucks from that type of service, they all joined the bandwagon and decided to start paying for exclusive rights to stream certain shows in an attempt to compel customers to pay for their streaming instead of the others, so now we have 300 different streaming services with disjointed catalogues, so piracy is back to being the easiest option unless you want to spend more time looking for a show than actually watching it[20].
Besides, streaming is terribly wasteful: instead of downloading a movie once and watching it infinitely, you need to redownload it every time you do. And downloading it has the additional advantage of the quality not depending on your connection speed: you can download the 4k version over dial-up and next month you can watch it without buffering.

Personally, I'm of the persuasion that people truly want to pay for products and services provided to them; the human brain has a sense of justice pretty firmly lodged into it and it applies to other people too, not just itself. So I think that people instinctively want to compensate others for the value they provide - "it is only fair", after all - but there's a limit of how many hoops they are willing to jump through to feel good about themselves. When people want something and you put every barrier in their way to get it from you, they will just get it from someone else.
But even with all the restrictions that DRM apply and with with piracy being easier than ever, some people still choose to pay when they could get something for free. That makes me think: what are they really paying for?
I found this essay explaining precisely that: qualities that cannot be copied and retain value even in a world without scarcity - that's what people are looking for when they choose to buy something. I don't have anything substantial to add to it, just go read it.

High sea marauders, doing God's work

Piracy stops being piracy the moment something is no longer obtainable through official means, it then becomes preservation.
Companies tend to be extremely neglectful with their products. Once something has ran its course and is no longer generating revenue, it will usually be left forgotten and unattended, with no effort made to preserve it for posterity, because preservation adds nothing to the bottom line.
Whole collections of digital media would be lost to time if not for the effort of archivists with no regard to copyright law ((the schizo-compulsive datahoarders)). Videogames, for example, have a staggeringly low preservation rate from their companies[21], so we have pirates to thank for keeping a lot of that stuff still accessible, even if outside the law.

Pirates are also to thank for not letting DRM get unbearably draconian. They might seem like the ones responsible for DRM being a thing in the first place, but I'm not entirely convinced Big Tech wouldn't still fuck with us just for the hell of it even if piracy didn't exist. Further, pirates serve as competition to their glorified monopoly. Even as unlawful competition, companies have to reckon with the fact that people will always have the option to go rogue, so they need to make a compromise with piracy in mind: they cannot gouge their prices too much and, to some extent, the stranglehold of DRM over their products needs to be carefully measured so it doesn't drive customers away into the pirate market.

In the mean time...

im gonna keep it real with you, none of these arguments matter
like at all
there is no need to justify anything bc in practical terms, nobody can really do anything against piracy
so it doesnt matter too much that copyright aint going anywhere anytime soon
also ppl like me feel the need to justify themselves bc something they consider a non-issue (getting files from friends) is decried by corpos as a major crime
it doesnt matter if piracy is "right" or "wrong", just torrent whatever you want and be happy
or be a paypig and be happy
its all fine as long as you and i are happy
unless you live in a police state that will actively send glowies to break down your door for not paying for the latest episode of my little pony, in that case: sucks to be a mutt :^)

More

• Miya On Buying Videogames (local archive)
• Copyright And "The Exclusive Right" Of Authors (PDF, 3.2 MB)
• YouTube's Copyright System Isn't Broken. The World's Is. (YouTube video)
• The Ethical Case Against Intellectual Property (by David Koepsell) (YouTube video)