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Not necessarily. I don't think content producers have any reasonable expectation to be compensated every single time someone views their work, on into eternity. I also don't think it's the government's job to guarantee by law the profitability of a certain segment of industry.

It's the job of a copyright regime to ensure that content production is profitable enough that people will want to produce content, not that it's profitable to the highest degree possible. It's actually quite important that content producers stop deriving income from their product as quickly as possible, so that they have an incentive to keep producing more, new material, instead of sitting atop their existing IP and collecting licensing fees on unto the heat-death of the universe.

So... no. People don't have an inherent right to make money from their creative product, or to control its distribution. We, the people of free democracies with copyright regimes, are nice enough to put in place a legal regime that allows content producers to make enough money that it'll be profitable to produce media. That's it. We certainly do not owe them money every time we consume that media, anywhere, forever.

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Edited 2010-03-10 17:09 UTC