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It's not a material good, but I believe that it is scarce. I believe it's scarce because you put X effort into creating intellectual property, and you get a finite quantity of intellectual property back for that effort, that remains constant. If I spend a year writing a book, that book remains constant piece of intellectual property without further work.
The rebuttal to this being offered, say, by the Mises Institute, seems to be that you can then take my book, and copy it, in digital format, for virtually no money or work, ergo, you're creating more intellectual property mroe or less for free, and therefore intellectual property isn't a scarce good.
The problem with this argument is that you're not creating more intellectual property when you copy a book or a movie. You're just taking the same intellectual property that already existed, and letting others make use of it, which is not the same as making more (hence the bagel example is a false analogy fallacy). Basically, the argument doesn't work precisely because it's not tangible, nor is it consumable, so you can't frame an argument by treating intellectual property like a tangible good (after supposedly claiming it isn't), and pretending that copying is the same as making more, because that logic only works with tangible goods. If I make a magical machine to copy my car, I hvae more car than before, but if you copy intellectual property, you still just have the same intellectual property before as after. I can scan my copy of Startide Rising, and make digital copypasta over and over and over until I'm blue in the face, but it wouldn't suddenly cause a new sequel in the Uplift series to spontaneously appear. The Uplift books are finite, they're scarce, because there are six books, and pending further effort, that's all there will ever be.
Given this fact, people are entitled to a return of investment on the work put into intellectual property, from each and every other person who uses it, precisely because it is scarce. It's basically a form of social contract between creators and consumers, and while, to make it fair, we put limits on copyrights, before which material enters the public domain, that return is still due.
This isn't some crusade by "the state", just a simple mechanic of how markets work, and the nature of intellectual property, the existence of which you can't just pretend away.
With all that said, SOPA and PIPA are not a solution to the issue of piracy. Even if they were, the price to society is too high, because even if they worked, we'd still lose more than we gained. Since they don't work, that makes them all the more foolish.
Edited by Catamount, 18 January 2012 - 11:52 AM.
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