Napster was like the lamp with the wrong pricetag

If a lamp were mislabeled at $15, despite its actual price of $100, would you pay $15 for it, or notify the management and pay $100?

This is supposed to illustrate why people will use Napster to steal copyrighted material. People will happily steal from a megacorp.

Answer Neither. The stores that I frequent tend to have explicit policies regarding mislabelled prices. Either:

• The item is free (They give it to me free once in exchange for not having to give a reduced price several times; or
• The item is the lower of the two prices.

Your fallacy is assuming that being willing to profit from a store's mistake is also a willingness to profit from the difficulty in enforcing copyright.

The analogy above would only be correct if all of the following were true:

1) The lamp store in question had one of the most powerful lobbies in Congress, and was therefore the recipient of some of the most shocking largesse from the public trough.

2) There were only a few lamp stores in the world and they used often illegal and certainly immoral means of preventing other lamp stores from opening or gaining market share (see Money For Nothing.)

3) Lamps that cost 3 cents to make were routinely sold for 1000% markup.

Do you think it's wrong to buy the lamp for $15 now? I certainly don't.