Criminalizing piracy is no trivial thing either. Once you can get over the fact that piracy is a complicated issue, that it is unlike stealing things -- where the owner of some object is deprived of his original possession, we can get to talking about piracy in a serious and mature way.
You miss the point. Spike Lee's argument is that he never employed the artist, even though his film company ultimately decided on the agent who promoted the film.
If he complains about piracy, all we have to do now is state on twitter:
"I Never Heard Of This Spike Lee,If He Has A Beef It's Not With Me.I Did Not Buy Him,Do Not Know Him.Cheap Trick Writing To Me.YO"
Looks like, to me, that unless Lee backs down, he'll be being mocked for quite some time to come :-)
It is still possible to respect intellectual property rights, authorship, be against piracy, support the allegedly-wronged artist, AND find Spike Lee to be an idiot.
The problem with piracy advocates is that they will seize any opportunity to justify piracy, and this is sadly no different. Too many people unfortunately see this as a black-and-white situation where you either support Spike Lee or support pirating his work.
By all means mock him, that's completely deserved.
I'm not saying that you should commit piracy. I'm saying that Spike Lee has put himself in an interesting position where he is now advocating piracy, and this may well be the response he starts getting if he complains his work is stolen in the future.
I am totally on board with you in terms of Spike Lee coming across as a total knob, but, unfortunately, and as evidenced by this thread, there are people who will never fail to latch on to these cases and use strawmen like Spike Lee as an excuse for some eye-for-an-eye Internet justice by means of piracy.
As long as someone can get downvoted to -4 for making that very basic point on Hacker News, the point apparently still has to be made, even though it's a waste of time for people like you who see the nuance of it. :)
