So, assume that we’re not talking about hostage-taking, AK-47-wielding Somali cargo ship commandos — you know, pirate pirates — and that instead we’re talking about middle-class, white downloaders of entertainment — you know, fake pirates.

If we’re talking about those “pirates” — or, less inflammatorily, “copyright infringers” … or, more romantically “copyleft freedom fighters” — then the following post will make a lot more sense.

We all know the “You wouldn’t steal a car…” line of reasoning, right? It appeared (and for all I know, continues to appear) at the start of movies in a ad for the RIAA.

You wouldn’t steal a car, goes the reasoning, so why would you steal a movie?

Leaving out the god-awful production values of the ad (don’t these people work for, you know, Hollywood?), it’s tempting to respond with a facile — “actually, I would steal a car, if I thought I could get away with it.” Or, more honestly, and a little less flippantly, “I would definitely download a car, if I could point my laptop at a neighbour’s vehicle, and create a perfect copy without depriving him of his own.” And wouldn’t GM be in trouble then!

Come to think of it, we’re ages away from Star-Trek-style replicators, but I wouldn’t be surprised if simple 3-D printing was only about a decade away from being a reality like desktop publishing is now.

Imagine if you could buy bags of potato starch, bring them home, stuff them in your “printer,” and have new, biodegradable, items printed out every day.

Potato starch isn’t good for everything, of course, but it would be great for children’s toys — a new one every morning, if you’re good! — and I’ll bet with a good-size device, you could even make patio furniture with it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if someone figured out how to make 3-D printing work with ceramic and glass, too, which opens up a whole range of household goods you could make.

Instead of just having a little miniature printing plant in your home, you’d have a little miniature factory.

Of course, your home printer didn’t completely obviate the need for real printing plants (and neither will the iPad), nor did it completely kill the publishing industry.

But I know a lot of people who are printing their wedding invites at home, rather than having a professional do it. (Of course, they’re all buying wedding-grade paper, and cool design kits, so it’s not like there’s zero industry there.)

But imagine the hypothetical post-scarcity society — one in which your super 3-D printer would be like a magic box that could give you anything you wanted. Just say the words, and “tea, Earl Gray, hot” would appear steaming in your just-created mug.

Wouldn’t that devastate the tea farmers? Would there be an industry backlash? Would people accuse tea-replicators of stealing from the farmers? Would the tea farmers’ union pop little ads on the side of the bags, “You wouldn’t clone a human…”?

Because the truth is that it would hurt the tea farmers. Just like printing wedding invites at home hurts independent print shops (who are largely out of business now, anyway). Just like me downloading all my mp3s has probably hurt a lot of artists — and the associated lawyers and executives who also made a living from them.

But it’s just that the post-scarcity society seems to have come to the entertainment industry before other industries. And while they’re going through the pains of a transition to some new economy, we’re all being guilted into sticking with the old economy.

(I wonder if there was a lot of guilt fed to consumers during the Industrial Revolution — think of all the people those machines are putting out of work?)

This really turned into a rant, but I intended it to be a short, quick-hit post. I only really wanted to embed this video, a parody of the RIAA “You wouldn’t steal a car…” ads.

So who does piracy really hurt? Oh, won’t somebody think of the gay porn models!

I got it from an excellent compendium of other parodies of the same. Watch the whole list at Freakbits.