I've been arguing for months with a guy who thinks the entire concept of intellectual property is literally highway robbery. According to him, artists and inventors have no right to charge people for copies of their work. Neither do they have any right to go after people who rip off their work. The reasoning here is that the information has always had the potential to exist in the universe and so the original author has no claim on subsequent discoveries of the same information. Dude really believes that he has just as much right to build and sell iPhones as Apple does. Not just generic smartphones -- actual iPhones.
I tell him that piracy is harmful. He says it isn't, because the act takes nothing away from the author. I tell him he's stealing people's work, making it easier for others to pirate, and devaluing the artist's brand. He dismisses all that, saying it's not theft unless he actually swipes the author's only copy.
I tell him that piracy is discouraging people from creating new things. He says that crowdfunding could easily do the same thing. I tell him it hasn't happened yet and he says it certainly would, if only IP laws weren't draining the economy. I ask him how he plans to crowdfund things like space travel and nuclear energy and he basically admits he doesn't know, but that it'll happen anyway.
I tell him that by pirating he's extracting value from the world, just like the rentseekers he hates so much. He says no, he's actually creating new value in the world, simply by downloading things to his hard drive. Copies aren't the original, so it follows that what appears in his computer memory has to be a brand-new creation.
I tell him about the Chamberlen, who kept the secret of forceps for 150 years. I ask him about all the women who died in childbirth during those 150 years. He ignores that point and insists that a world without IP is still somehow better.