

Why The Copyright Industry Isn’t a Legitimate Stakeholder in Copyright - alexkay
http://torrentfreak.com/why-the-copyright-industry-isnt-a-legitimate-stakeholder-in-copyright-110430/

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benologist
"Bricklayers don’t have laws guaranteeing they make money, marketers don’t,
plumbers don’t, and nobody else does, either."

They do if you take their services/products.

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bediger
Right. That's because a brick wall, marketing collateral and sewage or water
or gas pipes are physical goods. You can in fact, "take" their products.
Nobody can tell if you make a copy. In fact for digital music, technically
speaking, copying is required to reproduce the actual sound waves.

Also, in the real world, you've got contracts between the buyer of a good or
service and the manufacturer of a good, or the provider of a service. It's a
_civil_ law problem if one doesn't pay. The "intellectual property"
maximalists are asking to make infringements (note: _not_ theft) a criminal
offense, which is government support.

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benologist
Relying on physical vs ephemeral conveniently ignores that the cost to
_reproduce_ something has no relation to the cost _to_ produce something. The
other person/party not being aware of what you've done is pretty irrelevant
regardless of whether something is physical.

In the real world you also have _criminal_ law between you and the other
person _before_ you purchase something and establish that civil contract.

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bediger
The bulk of economics is against you. In a competitive market, prices fall to
the marginal cost of production. That's almost axiomatic. One only has to look
to fashion markets, where the leading players have almost zero monopoly power
and to PC hardware markets.

What you're implicitly advocating is setting prices without regard to market
forces, without regard to the value that consumers place on a good, without
regard to increasing efficiency of production via price competition. At best
this is short sighted, at worst it kills entire markets.

