I recommend reading the off-site lead-in post Ungrateful Hitchhikers to see why the above points don't address some of the implications of the argument Silas is making.

I've now read it. I'll set aside the fact that he is attempting to model owners of intellectual property as omniscient. I guess he is trying to slip in that old "But what if everybody did that?" argument. See, Omega-IP-owner knows that if you are an IP pirate, so is everyone else, so he won't even generate IP. So everyone dies in the desert. Well, I tend to think that Joseph Heller in "Catch 22" had the best answer to the "What if everyone did it?" gambit: "Well if everyone else did it, then I would be a damn fool to do any differently, wouldn't I?"

The right parable for the argument SilasBarta is trying to make comes from biology - from gene-clone selection theory (roughly Dawkins's Selfish gene). Suppose you are a red flower in a field of red flowers. Along comes a bee, hoping to pick up a little nectar. But what you really want is the pollen the bee carries, or maybe you want the bee to pick up your pollen. The question is whether you should actually provide nectar to the bee. She has already done what you wanted her to do. Giving her some nectar doesn't cost you very much, but it does cost something. So why pay the bee her nectar?

The answer is that you should give the bee the nectar because all the other flowers in the field are your siblings - if your genes tell you to stiff the bee, then their genes tell them the same. So the bee stops at just a few red flowers, comes up dry each time, and decides to try the white flowers in the next field. Jackpot! The bee returns to the hive, and soon there are hundreds of bees busily pollenating the white flowers. And next year, no more red flowers.

There, the parable works and we didn't even have to assume that the bee is omniscient.

Incidentally, if we now go back and look at my analysis of the Hitchhiker you will notice that my solution works because the driver expects almost every person he encounters to have an "honor module". He doesn't know for sure that the hitchhiker's honor is still intact, but it seems like a reasonable bet. Just as the bee guesses that the next flower she visits will provide nectar. Just as the author of "Steal this Book" guesses that most people won't.

I still much prefer my own analysis over that of the OP.