The Macalope is a very funny Mac-centric blog that pays the bills by skewering critics of Apple, usually by way of superior writing and hilarious malevolence, and by eviscerating the usual suspects of tech analysts, usually by way of pointing out how incredibly stupid the entire tech analyst racket is (John C. Welch does the same thing, only with less of the funny and more of the blistering righteous fury).

Unfortunately, the Macalope decided to venture out of his kingdom of humor and snark, and instead tried to skewer Todd Sullivan mathematically (for background see here, here, and here, in that order). Now, reading the Macalope’s post all I could think of was, “fucking idiot,” and then poured myself another highball. You know, whatever. I really don’t care about how much Apple makes, or does not make, on the iPhone, so long as mine keeps working as delightfully as it does.

But, then John Gruber sat at his keyboard and wrote something supremely stupid:

The Macalope on the bogus math behind the claim that unlocked iPhones will cost Apple “$1 billion” by the end of the year. (It’s the same sort of math the music industry uses to estimate how much money bootlegging costs them — based on the assumption that every single bootlegged track would otherwise have been purchased for the full retail price.)

Ah, damnit. That’s not the assumption. There is no assumption.

Let’s look at this another way…

Suppose you own a milkshake place. You make milkshakes. One day after work you make a wonderful strawberry milkshake for yourself, which you set down on the counter top. You turn around to get a some whipped cream and a cherry, to adorn the top of your milkshake, and while your back is turned I come in and I reach over with my straw and I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!

Naturally, you object.

My defense is, “If you hadn’t set your milkshake down on the counter top then I would never have drank your milkshake. So, truly, I’ve done nothing wrong, because you weren’t going to get anything from me anyway. And I, like, don’t even like milkshakes. I’m lactose intolerant. Bitch.”

Except, I drank your milkshake! I drank it up! I now have yummy strawberry milkshake in my belly, and for that you have received absolutely nothing. Win for me. You, not so much. That’s 1 for me, and 0 for you. That is to say, you’ve lost 1 milkshake. A milkshake I was supposed to pay for. A milkshake that tasted real good. I know, because I drank your milkshake!

The music industry is a toilet bowl, but this math is not bogus. People who pirate music are benefiting from the music they’ve downloaded. The hypothetical, “well they wouldn’t have paid for it” is the bullshit. It does not matter. The pirates possess something that they were supposed to pay for, but didn’t. That’s money that’s supposed to be in the pockets of the assholes that run the music industry, but isn’t. The hypothetical is irrelevant. The loss isn’t imaginary when the benefit to the pirate is real.

This is about what’s fair.

(I’m going to stop talking about the music industry now, because talking about fairness in the context of the music industry is obviously ridiculous.)

If I create something, and you take it, it is fair that I am compensated according to what I’ve valued that something at. Recently there’s been a lot of talk about Pixish and spec work. The issue there is the same here: people should not be unfairly benefiting from someone else’s work. An artist does a graphic design and doesn’t get paid for it. Apple creates the iPhone under certain terms and gets stiffed when people unlock it. A writer has every page of her book photographed and posted on the Internet. These aren’t fair.

I realize we now live in a world where it’s ME, ME, ME all the freakin’ time, and that’s exactly what people need to be aware of here. Did I benefit? More importantly, Was I supposed to? If the answer is “yes” and “no,” then there’s a problem.

A quantifiable problem.

You.