To the contrary the analogy is apt because when one takes the socks you are not harming the next consumer (sure the cost of shrinkage is passed on) and there are lots of places to get socks. But the party that is well and truly fucked the most is the producer of the socks who will derive no benefit from work spent, designing, promoting, producing or delivering the socks.
Your literal minded response suggests that, a product with a low incremental cost is a valid measure of of the total cost of production, which it is not. The cost is writers, actors, foley artists, costumers, grips etc. All of whom lose money when someone decides it's okay to steal a copy. That is a thief who will never pay a legitimate fee for what they have taken.
You miss a very key point. What percentage of sock sellers buy socks if they can't steal them? The number of people who pirate digital content that they would otherwise have bought is a lot lower than 100%. Another point. And some of the Pirates already own what they are pirating. I've pirated content that I own as I'm not allowed to stream from a DVD drive in a computer I own to a tv I own for some reason. Piracy is also quicker than ripping old DVDs to a format that is actually useful so I'm happy to acknowledge what I get up to.
A better example would be someone copying the sock exactly and using this copied sock. Yes, this violates rights of the original sock designer and manufacturer, but it doesn't actually take their sock.
> All of whom lose money when someone decides it's okay to steal a copy.
No. We could take a snapshot of some artist's bank account, ask her not to make or receive any payments for a short periods of while. During that while, I run a loop that downloads or makes a few million copies of some song or movie or whatever. Then we peek at her account again and look, the number is exactly as before. And again we have peace of mind in knowing that merely shuffling bits and bytes around a hard drive or even across a network link has no bearing on what happens in someone else's bank account.
No, the party that is fucked is the last step in the distribution chain, the one that actually sells the sock to the end user. The rest don't care, since the the sock store is just going to have to buy an additional sock from them to replenish stock.
That's the thing with physical goods. Once you receive money and give your customer the thing, if it gets stolen it's the customer's problem.
I have a couple quibbles with the way you're putting this, but I agree that the "copying costs nothing" argument does effectively pretend that the fixed costs of any production don't exist. The variable cost being zero is only tangentially relevant to the actual issue at hand.
Your literal minded response suggests that, a product with a low incremental cost is a valid measure of of the total cost of production, which it is not. The cost is writers, actors, foley artists, costumers, grips etc. All of whom lose money when someone decides it's okay to steal a copy. That is a thief who will never pay a legitimate fee for what they have taken.