OSNews

What entity exactly do you think creates and enforces these laws that they punish others with? The studios are indirectly taxing others through government enforcement mechanisms and laws designed to give them monopoly status for their material where it would not exist in a free market, or at least not in a form we would recognize today. Those companies receive special privileges from government and in exchange we are supposed to get fair use rights as a minor concession.

Intellectual so-called "property" is not affected by the laws of economic scarcity and therefore those who utilize these mechanisms are dependent upon the government to enforce their artificial monopoly upon the rest of the population, often with the effect of slowing economic and cultural progress.

This does not mean that there would not be any agreements regarding what we now consider intellectual "property" in a free market, the difference would be only what could be achieved through contractual relations and showing that taking others ideas without giving them credit is a considerable vice that should not be tolerated. As it is today the middlemen who control the distribution of content are typically the ones to be enriched and not the creators of the ideas themselves. This problem has been lessened to a greater degree in recent years, but it still remains an issue.

This government-granted monopoly has unseen effects upon the rest of the economy as well, as pointed out by Frédéric Bastiat almost two hundred years ago. We have no way of knowing what music and culture was not created because of this interference.