Anything that damages tax revenue to the tune of millions is a serious crime, because that’s whats running society. Whilst amusing, your illustrations neglects to mention that crime accompanies poor societies and so there is every chance that by retaining revenue the government are reducing the number of more serious crimes. This is true of much of SOCA’s work – your straw man shouts “I don’t care about the tax loss and the accompanying social decline”.

It may well be more harmful to pirate an artist than to rob them outright. A robbery is a one off occurrence where you lose a fixed value of capital, whereas piracy is a ongoing problem and will often cost a lot more than the value of goods your could carry in your arms. If you’re a dubstep artist you lose a lot more to piracy than if you’re a classical composer, as their product has far lower piracy ratios. As such, this is often a class specific crime – the poorest suffer, and a lot of these producers and artists wind up on the dole queue, some will go on to commit crimes.

A large percentage of, for example, early drum and bass artists were ex-convicts. The music gave them something productive to do with their lives; the main meeting points for the music back then were full of people that had done time then started recording. So, if you get merked by an ex-drum and bass artist, remember : over simplification of social interactions can lead to boundless irony.

I’ve read your comments on this subject before, and every time I do I think “there’s someone with absolutely no real-world experience of the issues he’s discussing”. I strongly suggest you spend a few years working at an independent UK record label. If you don’t really understand a topic, you should probably read and talk to more people instead of mouthing off publicly – your commentary reads “I PIRATE THINGS AND I’M PROUD, BIG DEAL!”. That’s fine, but by doing that you’ll need to demonstrate that you could run a society without the revenues of copyrighted materials and maintain living standards, something that hasn’t been achieved anywhere in the world. You sit on a throne and then decry the gold used to make it, maybe in the future you’d prefer the floor? A childs argument, free from the responsibilities of reality.

If we don’t have control of our ideas, then we as a nation are doomed, because we don’t have anything else. We”ve ditched the manufacturing, mining, agricultural industries and invested in the service sector, which hinges on designing and selling copyrighted products. Now you’re saying we shouldn’t protect that – there are plenty of places that don’t : Russia, China and much of Africa – move there and see how well the individual can manoeuvre in society with little to no rights to their ideas. All that happens is that power and money winds up in the hands of those that already have it; just like before we started enforcing copyright here.

Be seeing you.