"claim that piracy is not stealing"

Infringement is not stealing, or at least it wasn't before people started trying to abuse marketing to induce linguistic drift in order to promote their agenda.

I don't think "let's just punish this idiot first" is a reasonable can of paint to use. It's more likely to be taken as proof that the nominally legal or moral campaign of the copyright lobby is really just abusing the system for profit and power. Copyright lawyer or politician goes on about how horrible kids are for using Napster, is found committing plagiarism or lifting photos.

If anything, people want to punish them for abuse of power, not infringement. At most, it's "let's hang this guy with his own rope."

Infringement may not be stealing, but it's just as illegal. He's trying to implement a system for enforcing a law that already exists. In particular, it's a law where you get a warning before anything happens. How is that abusive?

Further, what is "nominally legal or moral" about protecting the rights of artists to be paid for the use of their works? If you build software and decide to charge for it, and someone else makes a bunch of copies of it and makes it impossible for you to make money from it, do you not want the law protecting you to be enforced? Last I checked, programmers have a hard time making money from merch and touring.

It's civil rather than criminal, or at least it used to be, so it is not really accurate to call them "just as illegal." It used to be you had to show damages and then sue for reparations. Regardless, conflating the two is disingenuous.

> what is "nominally legal or moral" about protecting the rights of artists to be paid for the use of their works

"Nominally," as in, "in name." It is claimed to be done to "protect the artist" - while the same people making this plea are and have been shafting the content creators as hard as possible by any trickery and chicanery they can get away with. There is a moral argument to be made, but the parties who are usually first to go there are decidedly amoral.

The moral of the argument and the person making it should be kept separate. Everyone thinks the RIAA should go fuck themselves. It doesn't mean there should be a content free for all to spite them and pretend that it's not hurting artists just as much.

And false advertising is just as illegal as trespassing, but that doesn't mean we should conflate them.

What's abusive is the punishment. Would it be abusive if a first offense of jaywalking was given a warning and the second punished by permanently stripping you of a drivers license?

If people were randomly walking into traffic at the same rate that they're taking content that doesn't belong to them I think we'd be pretty quick to support swift and decisive action. Everyone cries (me included) when some poor sap has to take a million dollar beating for downloading a handful of MP3s. If 1000 people losing the internet after being warned already once helps to stop that from happening, and simultaneously starts getting the public to take this issue seriously, I think everyone is better off for it. When you get a warning about this issue, you educate yourself about it, stop doing what you're not supposed to, and you move on. How long do we have to side with ignorance (meaning that people don't know they're doing something wrong) over fairness to content owners?

I don't think the give-him-some-of-his-own reaction shows "how weak the defense is for this side of the argument".

You may be taking the reaction literally, but it likely just means this: If we mock this politician by threatening to apply his policy to himself, it may begin to dawn on his supporters that he is wrong.

So folks are just making fun of him, and rightly so. I just think that this particular joke may backfire (see my other comment).

My understanding: The two-strikes plan is a really nasty thing in many ways which is perhaps understood almost unanimously in HN crowd.

The politician in question obviously does not understand that. He's the player at the poker table who doesn't know who's the weakest player at the said table. Therefore, he is that weakest player. He is therefore an idiot, as you have stated.

But the problem is that he is a dangerous idiot, and people are generally happy when a dangerous idiot is crushed by his own stupidity. He was dangerous and we could not do anything; but too good, he took care of that himself.

Nobody realistically expects the said law to be applied to the said politician. But suggesting that increases the level of that politician's misery and perhaps would teach a lesson to other dangerous idiots.

From my perspective the political game is not about actually getting things like this realised, but pushing the level of acceptance. He is making claims that are on a "borderline", meaning they are quite out there, but not "completely" insane. By doing this he attempts to push the level of acceptance further and move the middle ground towards his position. Good old Hegel'ian Dialectics.