You haven't managed to address the argument. Here it is again:
The author loses their product-to-sell, just as the farmer does. That we eat corn makes no difference at all. Producers deserve a right to their product whether or not that product is consumable, and the injustice comes in depriving them of remuneration for their work. You are misconstruing this as theft of a private good which was to be used in a private capacity. What in fact is being stolen is a good that is to be sold to the public, and hence the subject is labor and remuneration. To steal the rights to a book (or part of those rights) results in the exact same sort of deprivation that the theft of consumable goods results in.
You are confused because the farmer's right to his corn is more difficult to distinguish from his possession of the physical corn. A farmer in possession of physical corn has a prima facie right to that corn, and it is difficult to separate these two realities. But in the author's case they separate much more easily. An author in possession of a manuscript does not have an enforceable right to the intellectual content of the manuscript sans legal protections, and without those legal protections his labor cannot be reliably monetized. Or in other words, there is parity with respect to the legal issue at stake, but because it is easier to steal the right to intellectual property than the right to consumable property, the former requires special legal protections.
You seem to be vigorously trying to argue something that doesn't seem to be in tension with what my point was. Your argument is that the moral argument against piracy is based on compensation (or as you write it, "remuneration"). Which... I said was the case? My contention was that because the moral argument against things like mugging was based on the fact it
removes material from the victim, whereas the argument against piracy is that it
denies giving them something which is owed (compensation/remuneration), the comparison doesn't make much sense, and that trying to do so is more about making a strong rhetorical point than making a valid comparison because actual theft brings in greater moral outrage than questions about compensation do, as well as other various reasons that make actual theft more easy to rally against.
For example, earlier I brought up the issue of libraries. If I get a book from the library, I am paying no money at all to the author of the book, nor am I giving any money to any store selling it. But I still get to use it. The same ethical objections to piracy seem to apply here. But I don't see people rallying against piracy as being immoral doing the same thing to libraries (on multiple occasions, in fact, I've seen people who criticize piracy say there's no issue getting the work from a library). What, then, is the
moral difference? The only real difference I see, aside from the fact one is legal and the other is not (which isn't a moral argument), is the fact that libraries are less convenient than piracy. Does that mean if piracy is less convenient, it would be as morally acceptable as using a library? This is the kind of question that is irrelevant on an "actual theft" argument, but pops up when the argument is compensation for work.
Even in spite of the J-Stor preview you Googled, my point holds: there was a copyright quarrel in the 6th century (whether or not it resulted in bloodshed).
Actually, I didn't find it by using Google, and actually had looked some into the issue before you made your reply (though I did look more into it when I made my reply to yours, and looked into it more closely for this new reply you're reading).
In any event, how does your point still stand? As the article I pointed to said, the first mention we have of the supposed "copyright quarrel" is from one thousand years later. The issue isn't whether there was bloodshed (we know the battle occurred), but whether any copyright quarrel had anything to do with it. The article I pointed to asserts that the first mention of the manuscript dispute we have is in a work one thousand years after the fact, which (according to it) doesn't seem to fit with the actual events of the battle, which to me is an
extremely strong indication the story is legendary.
I admit, of course, that I have not looked through all the works about the individuals involved in this alleged conflict, so I have to take its word that the first mention we have is from the 16th century. Maybe it's wrong. But if so, it would be nice if you were to provide evidence of that fact, like pointing to earlier sources that refer to it.
However, other scholarly sources do confirm that the story is of a later date and therefore less reliable. For example, the Catholic Encyclopedia says this in
its St. Columba article:
"Columba left Ireland and passed over into Scotland in 563. The motives for this migration have been frequently discussed. Bede simply says: "Venit de Hibernia . . . praedicaturus verbum Dei" (H. E., III, iv); Adarnnan: "pro Christo perigrinari volens enavigavit" (Praef., II).
Later writers state that his departure was due to the fact that he had induced the clan Neill to rise and engage in battle against King Diarmait at Cooldrevny in 561. The reasons alleged for this action of Columba are: (1) The king's violation of the right of sanctuary belonging to Columba's person as a monk on the occasion of the murder of Prince Curnan, the saint's kinsman;
(2) Diarmait's adverse judgment concerning the copy Columba had secretly made of St. Finnian's psalter. Columba is said to have supported by his prayers the men of the North who were fighting while Finnian did the same for Diarmait's men. The latter were defeated with a loss of three thousand. Columba's conscience smote him, and he had recourse to his confessor, St. Molaise, who imposed this severe penance: to leave Ireland and preach the Gospel so as to gain as many souls to Christ as lives lost at Cooldrevny, and never more to look upon his native land.
Some writers hold that these are legends invented by the bards and romancers of a later age, because there is no mention of them by the earliest authorities (O'Hanlon, Lives of the Ir. Saints, VI, 353). Cardinal Moran accepts no other motive than that assigned by Adamnan, "a desire to carry the Gospel to a pagan nation and to win souls to God". (Lives of Irish Saints in Great Britain, 67)."
Although less specific than the article I quoted (it doesn't say when it first showed up), it nevertheless indicates it, along with the other things it refers to, were found only later on. I looked into the New Catholic Encyclopedia to see if it gave more information, but it doesn't mention the incident at all in its article on Columba (perhaps it simply didn't think it was credible enough to mention at all, even as a dubious legend).
Just to try to be more thorough, I looked at Adomnan's "LIfe of St. Columba" from the 7th century, which I believe is the earliest source we have of Columba's life. It does not appear to mention the story; the
"Lives of the Irish Saints" book referred to by the Catholic Encyclopedia above, indeed, mentions it was not found in Adomnan's work. But to try to be sure, I looked at an English translation of the Life of St. Columba
here. At 156 pages (not counting introduction and appendix), it's a bit too long for me to read through all of it to be absolutely sure the story isn't there, but I did do some searches through the work for related terms (e.g. "psalter", "copy", "Finnian", "cow", "calf" (the latter two referring to the supposed quote of the king)), which turn up nothing. So it just doesn't seem to be there. Given that it supposedly caused a battle where thousands died and was the supposed reason Columba left Ireland, one would think that it would merit a mention in a biography!
It is, no doubt, obviously a popular
story about Columba, which was repeated by many much later on. But it is extremely dubious it ever happened given that it appears to only be mentioned
long after it supposedly occurred and is not mentioned by earlier writers, even at least one who wrote specifically about the life of Columba!
If you wish to continue to use this as an example of copyright precedent, it seems you need to do one of two things:
1) Offer a reasonable explanation of why, for about a thousand years, no work we have about St. Columba or about anyone else related in the supposed conflict mentioned this rather noteworthy event.
2) Offer an earlier source, reasonably close to the time period it happened, that
does mention it.
No it's not. Stop making up false definitions.
Do you deny that pirates are copying things? Do you deny that they are distributing them for free? Because... that's what they're doing. I'm extremely confused as to why you are denying that pirates are doing things they are undeniably doing. If they
weren't copying, then people wouldn't have a problem with them!
Perhaps your complaint is that if someone were to offer a
definition of piracy, it wouldn't be what I said. Well, okay... but in what you were objecting to, I wasn't ever offering any definition (I never used the word definition), just saying what they do. "Someone who practices medicine" is what a doctor does, but that's obviously not the
definition of a doctor because people other than doctors do that. The whole point I was trying to make originally which caused you to get upset about this was when I was differentiating a modern pirate (who usually copies and distributes for
free without authorization) with printers in the earlier days of the printing press who would copy
and sell someone else's work without their authorization.
The one time I explicitly said definition was in my first post in this topic, where I said when I used piracy in it, the meaning I had in mind was "distributing for free a copy of the entirety of a copyrighted work without permission." While admittedly some pirates do charge, they are in the minority from what I can tell, and the piracy I was concerned about talking about in the post was the free time, hence my definition offered for that post. Someone could object to "the entirety" but I thought it was important to put that there to differentiate between someone who just quoted a sentence from something (perhaps "a substantial amount" would have been better than "the entirety").
