Arguments in favour of filesharing inevitably bring up the concept of free dissemination: of culture, of information, of ideas. Sounds lovely, everybody sharing, but these arguments ignore one crucial point: give and take isn't just about taking. If you move into a shared house, eat your housemates' food, give it away to passersby and don't buy any yourself, you are contributing absolutely nothing to the arrangement. Sociologists call this the free rider problem. And free riders can only operate successfully when they're not the majority, because if everyone free rides then who's buying the groceries?

Consider the same situation but with something immaterial – say, an MP3 – and people can't see the argument. As Alexandros Stavrakas writes, users of peer-to-peer networks contribute bandwidth. Yes, they do: to each other. That's still part of the "take" end of the arrangement.

I have yet to read a sensible argument in favour of filesharing. If culture should only be created for the purposes of joy and enriching the masses, presumably none of us are allowed to have jobs in the arts. You must get a boring job. Any creating must be done out of love and if you starve, that will simply add authenticity.

Anyone who cares about copyright must be a cog in a gigantic money-grabbing corporation because there aren't any writers, photographers or musicians out there desperately trying to stop people from pinching copies of their work. And anyone advocating the free dissemination of culture is only doing so out of concern for the greater good. Which is why presumably you're all also ensuring unsold food from supermarkets goes to homeless people, and campaigning for the free dissemination of life-saving medicines, because if you care about people being given access to things they desperately need, obviously you're going to start with the basics, such as food and heating. In fact, I'm impressed you've still got time to argue for free access to MP3s.

I wish you filesharers would just admit the truth: you don't want to pay. Instead, you bang on about how it's fine to pass copies around because you haven't removed the original, even though the basic tenets of copyright law are founded on the idea that infringement occurs if you copy the most important part of the work (copying all of it definitely qualifies). Stavrakas says "downloading a song, book or a movie does not deprive anyone else, including their 'rightful owners', of them." But you're depriving them of control over their own creation. Hey, how about I help myself to your car while you're on holiday. It's OK, I'm not going to deprive you of it – I'll leave it where I found it, with the same amount of petrol and everything, so that's fine, right?

In June, the Guardian published a handful of readers' letters advocating free downloads.

"Digitisation and the internet have turned copyright into an appallingly restrictive anachronism" – translation: many people think "easily available" should mean "free".

"Information technology gives us the potential to provide free and universal access to almost all human knowledge, art and entertainment" – translation: to help ourselves to anything we fancy.

"Set against that loss are the millions of people enjoying music, films, the written and spoken word, computer software and access to information who would otherwise have gone without" – translation: actually had to pay for it.

"Despite what the music industry want us to believe, illegal downloading has a purely positive impact on everyone involved except the middleman: the soon-to-be-redundant industry itself" – translation: stealing benefits everyone except the people you are stealing from.

So you think it costs too much to buy a film, or a song, or an album? Why don't you film, or record, your own? You're not going to die if you don't see/hear/enjoy that one, you just want to. So create another. What's that, I hear? You can't actually make your own feature film, or record your own studio album, or write your own novel, because you don't have the resources or the talent or the time or the knowledge or the ideas? Oh dear. Better steal someone else's, then.