Of course the internet is regulated. The Digital Millennium Act would be one example. Products sold on the web are subject to the same commerce regulations that any other product would be subject to. Tax law applies to people offering goods for sale over the net. Etc. Bullshit. As a small, independent artist, I've lost thousands of dollars over the years as a direct result of copyright infringement. A few years ago, I took some portraits of my friend's 7 year old son. One day, I found a multi-national corporation using that image on their website. They didn't have my permission to use a product I created, nor did they have permission to use this child's image in their advertising. That's not a "free-market", nor is that a victimless crime. They were making money off of a tangible product that I created using my own money, time and equipment, and they stole it off of my business website that *I* pay for. In a free market, you pay for what you use. How on earth could I sell my products without showing it to the public? It is no different then if someone creates a product and puts in a store. That product is not free for the taking just because it's not hidden behind a closet door.
Copyright infringement does not inherently mean a lost sale on the part of the copyright holder. This is assuming that if it were not able to be procured by illegal means that the offending party would still bother (or be able or inclined to) purchase rights to use said item.
I'm sorry Pen, but again I have to disagree with you on some things Yes, you're right on these things, most of them are extensions of real world law so I think some eyes glaze over them. I think, maybe, you're considering that every work 'stolen' from you would have been a sale. That's just not true. When it's free more people take it. To me, I think you're fortunate for having your work exposed to that many more people. The Internet was just better at disseminating your work than you were. I'll start at the end. You pay for what you use. True, but you can pay for things in ways other than money. More than likely, what happened was someone spidered or crawled the web for content and sold your work as part of a large package of work to a stock content site or business who then sold it to the multinational corporation. More than likely, more effort has gone into your work since it was copied than you put in to it. Do you still have the originals? If so, then I can't say they stole it from you. I think that the value these works have to you is greater than the value the rest of the world is getting from it. And I kind of think that is what really bothers you. You would probably need to innovate. Watermarks are a common and accepted invention. Or it's like someone walks into a store with a fancy machine that instantly builds a copy of that product and then walks out of the store with that copy. Honestly, if you are claiming absolute ownership of your work then you need to include the thousands of people who made your camera(s), programmed any editing software, and contributed to the style and usage guidelines of photography to name a few.
Maybe you shouldn't put your arts online at the first place, specially if you don't want to be 'shared.' It's your fault for putting up online. Remember, Internet is sharing.
Pharmacutical companies are an excellent example of how copyright is outrageous and hurts society. They make a drug for AIDS treatment charge a fortune for the drug and have a government protected monopoly due to copyright law. While they hold the copyright tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people die because they cannot afford to treat their AIDS. If this artificial monopoly was not created by the government these pharmaceutical companies would face competition and would be forced to lower their prices so that they can compete. They would still make a butt load of money but they would have to charge a reasonable price. People can still make fortunes from their inventions, they have a head start after all, they just will be forced by the market to sell their product cheaper.
Tangible goods, we all agree, are properly the objects of property rights. This is because they are economically scarce. But the notion that the mere act of creation confers ownership is problematic. Drawing on Lockean principles of homesteading, property theorists like Mr. Kinsella reject it in favor of economic scarcity as "the hallmark of ownable property." Scholars like Sir Arnold Plant and Tom G. Palmer, along with virtually all property theorists of the Austrian libertarian school, recognize that scarcity precedes property. Economic scarcity results when my use of an item conflicts with your use of it. While an abundance of computers can be had on the market, my use of this particular PC excludes your use of it. We might come to blows were we to both insist on occupying the thing. If I could conjure computers with a magic wand, they would be abundant, not scarce, and it would be immaterial if this one were removed. In the case of scarce resources, property rights are essential in order to prevent conflict. Not so for intangible things, such as the ideas copyright and patents protect. However valuable, ideas are not economically scarce: My listening to a piece of music doesn’t conflict with or exclude your doing the same. Ditto for a book: A copy made of the thing doesn’t remove from its author the configuration of ideas that is the book. Granted, copyright law protects only the physical instantiation of an idea. Humming a song won’t secure copyright in it. The idea must be written down to become fixed in a tangible medium. Here is the nub: Copyright is vested in a physical object that can be owned quite legitimately by someone other than the author of the book, the singer on a CD or the code writer of a software program. It is in the rightfully owned property of others that the copyright owner acquires a stake. Say I write a novel and you decide to film a movie based on my novel’s plot using your own filming equipment. Were I only to proclaim I owned the ideas in my novel, I would merely be exercising my free speech. But when I want to prohibit you from using your filming equipment as you please, and can use the force of law to do so, I am violating your property right. Under the law as it now stands, my act of creation is all it takes for me to be able to exercise control over your filming equipment. Put another way, imagine you could reproduce at almost no cost copies of a scarce tangible item like a desk I designed. Would I be justified in prohibiting you from using your copy of my desk simply because I created the original item? Would it be right to demand that you pay me a stipend for every copy of my desk you made using your own desk copier, so that I might secure for myself a tidy source of revenue? If you dare resist my attempts at extortion, I will galvanize the law. After all, you are cutting into an income I imagine I am owed. Copyright redistributes wealth, as the workings of the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act makes evident. Here manufacturers like Yamaha or Philips who market digital audio tape recorders and CD-R burners must pay a statutory royalty as a penalty for making devices that could foreseeably be used to infringe copyright. Such manufacturers must pony up for the potential undermining of the value of copyrighted material. Notwithstanding the incoherence of assigning rights in some imagined value the copyrighted material may have, wealth here is distributed from manufacturer to music industry. Similarly, consumers who purchase blank recording media must pay special excise taxes to the music industry.
How would I have a business if I couldn't show my work publicly? That's like saying if you don't want someone to steal from your store, you shouldn't put goods on the shelf. Stealing anything doesn't inherently mean a lost sale. Someone who's going to steal a bottle of perfume (for example), probably wouldn't buy it in the first place. It's still theft. One of the things that makes my commercial art valuable to my clients is their exclusive use of my work. If I sell the the exclusive rights to a photo, and one of their competitors can legally just steal it off of the internet, that photo has lost all of it's value. A product that (again) costs me time and money to create and serves a valuable purpose. Artwork is a tangible good. Just because it's in digital form, just because you can be easily copy it, doesn't make it any less tangible.
Now I'm not one to necessarily defend the practices of big pharma in general...but the reality is that in your example it costs these companies billions to develop a drug. Given that fact, how exactly can a company ever expect to even come close to making their money back (let alone make a profit), and thus have any incentive for making the drug in the first place, when as soon as their drug is released to the public to cure cancer any joe-schmoe can synthesize it in their basement and sell it for almost nothing? Seriously...you guys bitch about entitlement programs and poor lazy people leeching off the tax money stolen from your hard earned salaries, yet bitterly defend your right to take intellectual property that cost someone billions of their own personal money to develop and use that for your own personal financial gain even if you contributed nothing to its billion-dollar development process. I of course will agree that not all copyright/patent rules are necessarily written fairly, and many companies with said patents use that legal protection to extort their customers in arguably immoral ways that leave the most needy and poor without life saving medication. Indeed the system needs to be reworked in many respects, but to abolish the system completely leaves absolutely no incentive for any of these drug companies to ever make any drug. You can say goodbye to any potential cure for any ailment, ever.
Apples and Oranges. Copyright infringement isn't theft. If I stole a perfume then you've lost the ability to sell that perfume to another customer. If I copy it you haven't, nor have you lost a sale. Now if they're selling your photo then gross commercial copyright may mean you've lost a sale, providing you can reach the same customer they are selling to. If you can't it's not a lost sale.
So the self preservation instinct goes out the window if there are no patents for drugs? Nobody is going to work on a cure for diseases or other various ailments ever again? Maybe it should be looked into why these companies spend billions of dollars developing said drugs, surely it isn't related at all to the multi-billion dollar profits they reap in return. To not suspect there is waste in the R&D programs is just being naive.
If you copy a photo then I no longer have the exclusive rights to my work. If I no longer have exclusive rights, then I have nothing left to sell to my clients. Thus, if you've copied my work, I've lost my ability to sell my work, and I've lost a sale. Thank god for my copyright attorney...
You have your work to sell to your clients, as I said it's a lost sale if you can reach the same market. If you can't then you've lost nothing as you wouldn't have been able to make the same sale the person or group infringing on your copyright has. This is all assuming you're selling the work for the same price, if they're charging less then that complicates it even more. No idea who he is, does he disagree with copyright law too?
Why can't the incentive to make a good product be to help people or please people with a quality product? If you removed the money incentive, than the people who really wanted to help humanity would develop the product. Plus, big pharma is absolutely horrific when it comes to disease. Natural cures are 1000x better....
LOL are you trying to troll me or something? [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTjf1wzCrK8]Cain and Romney Have Fruit-Fight Over 9-9-9 - YouTube[/ame]