What I said is that it's a contentious issue. It doesn't really matter what copyright is meant to be, only what it actually is, and there are both people who be

What I said is that it's a contentious issue. It doesn't really matter what copyright is meant to be, only what it actually is, and there are both people who belive it's beneficial to society and people who believe it's detrimental to society. The overall effects of leaked material are related but not the same as the existence of copyright. Both copyright and leaks can and do coexist, so even if copyright is a social good, leaks could still be an overall benefit to society. I would say that it's hard to argue that the ability to make and share infinite copies of something at almost no cost is a benefit to society, especially for the spread of culture, but I agree that it's damaging to the concept of intellectual property. So this issue of leaked materials being overall good or bad is really a proxy for a deeper argument. If you're starting from the position that property rights are more important than the spread of culture and the availability of material, you can still believe that leaks are overall a social good, one which needs to be sacrificed at times for the greater good of copyright and protection of intellectual property. We have to make these kinds of sacrifices all the time, which leads to interesting situations like this. Sometimes, the best thing for society is that laws are broken, even if those laws are essentially correct. The perfect society isn't necessarily one that always follows the rules, but one that makes the right sacrifices for the overall good. Copyright is probably the best example of this situation. Even if the laws are entirely justified, there are plenty of situations in which innovation happened because someone learned something from leaked copyrighted material. It's tempting to believe that it's possible to create a set of rules that everyone can agree to and always create the optimal situation, but in the real world, this never happens. The real world is messy, and sometimes entirely justifiable laws have a net positive effect when they're broken.