Demonstrate how this isn't a semantic argument? People aren't "brainwashed" into thinking copyright infringement is wrong. Copyright infringement is intuitively wrong.
Thou shalt not copy this scroll without the author's permission? I don't buy it and it doesn't hold ground historically.
Did people not intuit it before the 18th century? It took over 300 years from the invention of the printing press for modern copyright law to form.
Copyright (and patent) law exists and has always existed because it makes political and economic sense.
See Section I, Article 8 is the US Constitution, for example, where Congress gets its authority to establish copyright. Why do they have that authority? To promote the progress of science and useful arts.
Copyright law is a fundamentally different creature than the criminal law that governs theft and, IMO, this is just a reflection of their differing moral status in society.
You still haven't rescued this from semantics. What's intuitively wrong is freeloading. Tax evasion is a criminal offense, even though it too is simply an example of freeloading.
I'm not sure what there is to rescue. I feel like I'm repeating myself.
Matt's argument, however implicit, was that copyright infringement is wrong because it's a kind of theft. It's not, nor has it ever been and therefore his argument is fallacious.
If that's a semantic argument then I guess I'll have to live with that.
Why is freeloading wrong? Or tax evasion, for that matter?
In any case, here is the argument. Theft is wrong because it violates the individual right of the property owner.
Copyright exists to provide a temporary incentive for content creators to continue producing. It's not a natural right, it's a collective bargain between the public and content producers. "You get a 14 year monopoly to make some money, please continue writing songs."
That bargain was broken a long time ago (roughly Mickey Mouse invention date + 14 years).
I don't know if I can agree that copyright infringement is intuitively wrong as my own intuition tells me the exact opposite: Legal enforcement of an artificial scarcity on our cultural and intellectual artifacts so that a minority of individuals can personally benefit is morally incorrect.
Even if there was broad consensus that copyright infringement is 'intuitively wrong', intuition has a rather spotty track record for producing sensible normative ethical guidelines. Consider slavery, for example. It used to be so 'intuitive' that owning other humans as property was not morally problematic.
