Technological innovation in a competitive free market has nothing to do with the original point. Meh, I'm over it. At the end of the day, I feel that copyright infringement is stealing, and other people don't. I am fine with a legal distinction, but I see no such distinction from a layman's moral standpoint.
But laws and policy aren't about feelings; they rely on consistent and precise definitions of terms.
If anything here is a strawman, it's your insistence on equivocating two behaviors which are substantively and observably different in their intentions, methods, and effects, in order to apply the moral censure earned by one disingenuously to the other.
If you want to make a meaningful argument against copyright infringement in its own right, please do so; I'd welcome the productive discourse. But arguing against it by calling it calling it by the name of another thing entirely - without bothering to establish a coherent connection between the two - doesn't constitute a valid argument in the slightest.
Further, my previous comment involved nothing resembling a strawman at all; you offered the position that copyright ought to be protected in order to ensure that the time and labor input into the initial design of a creative work would always yield a return for the creator, and I replied by pointing out that these are capital expenditures, to which no one in any field is entitled a guaranteed return at all.
Do you seriously regard as a strawman my classification of the advance investments necessary to open a factory and the advance investments necessary to produce a film both as capital expenditures, but simultaneously claim that your equivocation of copyright infringement with stealing is a robust and substantive assertion?
> I see no such distinction from a layman's moral standpoint
Then why do so many "laymen" actively assert this distinction?
Again, I have to point out that your methods of discourse actively reduce the credibility of your position.
