> 'Piracy' is absolutely unnecessary for the market to operate effectively, the evidence for that is all around you: physical goods can generally not be pirated

> 'Piracy' is absolutely unnecessary for the market to operate effectively, the evidence for that is all around you: physical goods can generally not be pirated! How does the 'economy' work for your Milk and Cereal producers? Just fine. Yeah, but... imagine your Milk could be pirated - some friendly alien civilization drops by to say hi and leaves 8 billion - one for each human - of matter transmuters behind. These contraptions tap into universe's dark matter supply through a micro-wormhole and are able to materialize anything the user wants, seemingly out of nothing (there's a lot of dark matter out there). Would my Milk and Cereal producers, along with the whole economic environment they inhabit, still be able to run on the pre-transmuters rules and principles? Whether something can be replicated for near-zero cost or not is such a huge, vast difference that trying to apply rules that work in either case to the other cannot possibly yield good results.