The problem isn't piracy, it's your product and publisher.

<provocative opening statement> A common saying you hear now a days in arguments about piracy is "I think people should get paid for their creative work".    Yeah, well I don't. </end troll-bait>

I think you should get paid for how well the free market likes you and decides to pay you.  It is your job to figure out how to be a businessmen and make money.

But I'm just an author and don't understand business!

Then hire the person who is supposed to understand these things -- a publisher!  It's their responsibility, it is why you hire them, to make money in the marketplace with your creative work.  Historically they've been quite good at this.  Now that the market has been made more competitive (piracy is, after all, just a competitor to the work a publisher traditionally does) guess who are the ones complaining loudest?  That's right, the folks who are supposed to be competing in the marketplace -- the publishers.  Rather than compete against a competitor they are complaining for regulation to help keep their business afloat.

To paraphrase Gabe Newell's Piracy is a service problem:  If you are being pirated, it means there's something wrong with the service to begin with.  Somebody finds it more enjoyable or values more the experience of pirating your work than to get it via the channels you are offering.  Therefore you need to find a way to make your product more valuable than the pirated one.  Let me repeat that: It is your responsibility, as the person who wants to make money, to find a way to make your users happy enough that they want to pay you.

I don't know of any other example of a business where I can launch my business, make money, have a competitor come in and then beg the government to make them go away.

Anybody who is complaining that piracy hurts their business is simply avoiding the problem that they aren't providing a product that the marketplace likes enough to make money. Sure, piracy is incredible efficient so it makes your problem harder but that's not the marketplace's fault. Technology's job is to make life more efficient and better for end users, I like to call it progress.

So rather than legislate to defend the old business models of a sector which was supposed to be market savvy to begin with, why don't we let the market be efficient and have people innovate and let the businesses or technology that can provide the most end-user value win?

Discuss.