Actually this case was an example of the system working the way it's supposed to.
If the system was working the way it was supposed to, this patent & 90% of the others would be laughed out of the Patent Office front door.
The fact that the _backup_ system (the U.S. Court of Appeals) managed to work in THIS ONE CASE, hardly means that the system is working the way it's supposed to.
Gene therapy using viruses has failed because the body attacks the modified virus.
Really? I thought it was because they didn't have a way to control WHERE the genes got inserted, and sometimes they ended up getting inserted in a place that caused leukemia.
If Microsoft ticks them off enough, then they decide that rewarding homegrown thieves are more palatable than becoming Microsoft's puppy dog.
All this is besides the point, though.
All I was trying to point out is, for a company which depends on intellectual property law for its business model, maintaining good relations with the lawmakers who prop up that business model is an absolute requirement.
Unlike for normal manufacturers or service providers, where they can stop providing the goods or service if they don't get paid, Microsoft has no short-term control over their product without the willing enforcements of the government.
If the EU grants immunity (and maybe a big amount of Euros) to whoever gives them the code, I'm sure they could get their hands on it.
All this really points out is how ephemeral a "retail" software developer's business model really is. If the government doesn't prop such a business model up, then there's really nothing that the company can do to control their "product" once it leaves their immediate control.
MS would threaten it, maybe stop selling Windows in Europe for a few weeks,
What point would that serve? The EU could just forcibly Open Source everything that Microsoft-Europe has on the spot, and Microsoft would become a completely ephemeral entity as far as the EU was concerned.
While those things looked cool, he didn't feel that he would fit in with a company that spent money on the cool stuff as opposed to spending money on development.
I find it cool when I know that the equipment around me is processing so much information, I get the subjective feeling that time/space around me is being warped due to the information density...
Actually, among other things, corporations do need to pay taxes.
I'm not sure what your point is - just because corporations pay taxes doesn't make them any more of a "real" person. Unlike a real person, the government could easily pass laws which force corporations give 100% of all of their assets to the government, and the corporations would not have any inherent "rights" to prevent that.
It is a limitation on a copyright holder's rights.
You mean a limitation on a copyright holder's privileges.
Nobody has a "right" to control copying (even given the misleading name for it) - they are granted the privilege of controlling it with the goal of benefiting society.
You have some problem with the law being enforced?
I've got a problem with the feedback system involved with speed tickets - the fact that a lot of police departments have a big chunk of their budget dependent on the revenue from speeding tickets. That kind of feedback loop will inevitably cause the police to find reasons to give people speeding tickets, to set up situations where it is highly probable that people would probably speed, and in extreme cases, to flat-out lie that people where speeding (and get them in a front of a traffic judge who likes those kickbacks).
Enforcing speeding laws is a reasonable way to catch irresponsible drivers, but the police should balance the relative benefits of enforcing such laws with the benefits of enforcing other normal safety laws (like catching murders, rapists, muggers, robbers, etc), without having to take into account their budget requirements.
As somebody who believes in private property rights, I think I should be allowed to do whatever I want with my private property (e.g., make copies up the wazoo if I want to), as long as it doesn't violate the safety or rights of someone else.
"Intellectual property" laws violate private property rights. There's no reason to feel guilty about being annoyed with laws that are designed to give control over your private property to someone who you've never signed a contract with.
Nobody has the "right" to determine distribution except for the person who is doing the distributing.
Now, the legal system grants the PRIVILEGE of determining distribution, in a failed experiment to encourage creativity, but it is not a RIGHT (regardless of what the name says).
Explain how a programmer--any programmer--could possibly make a living by plying their trade if it is given that anybody could take a copy of their work and give it away for free. Explain how an individual could possibly accumulate the years of experience and expertise necessary to become a skilled programmer and still manage to feed, clothe and shelter themselves. The only plausible scenario I see is that programmers go to work for entities large enough to employ them to build internal systems.
That's one way, or you use your expertise to construct tools which you use to provide services for efficiently than your competitors. Or you can provide a one-shot programming solution for an up front charge. Or be on retainer. In other words, you will be compensated for providing a desired good or service, just like every other craftsperson on the planet. Just don't expect to sell a product on a store shelf for more than people are willing to pay for the copy. If you want to KEEP getting paid, then you will have to keep producing desired goods & services - just like every other craftsperson on the planet.
I am a CAD developer working for a chip-making company. I got most of my skills by playing around with computers since I was little, going to school, and from my work experience. I get paid a salary to write software for them. If I stopped writing software for them, I would expect them to stop paying me - I would not expect them to keep paying me every time they used my software (unless I had convinced them to sign a contract with me that said so).
There is absolutely no reason why "knowledge workers" need special protection for their work, other than the desire of some people to leverage more money out of such work than the free market would be willing to normally pay.
just about every stable society on the face of the planet today recognizes that there is value in intellectual property and other intangible assets
Only if you judge by the memes spread by the mass media, which is all controlled by people who have a vested interest in maintaining strong controls over the channels of information flow. If you look past the spin, however, you'll note that most people figure they should be able to do what they want with their own private property, and pay little attention to the laws which say they can't make copies of whatever for themselves. Even people who don't use P2P generally do so because they think, like yourself, that creators need a subsidy to keep creating - and not specifically because they think that "intellectual property" is REAL property and that it should be treated as such. And the huge number of people who DO use P2P generally think that all the "intellectual property" propaganda is just B.S., and that they should be able to do what they want with their own private property.
To properly evaluate whether "intellectual property" laws result in a net benefit or loss to a society, you need to compare societies with & without them (assuming that such laws are actually being enforced). I've got two general examples which I usually drag out to illustrate my point: when the U.S. was very young, a great deal of its rapid growth was due to the fact that it heavily "stole" industrial ideas from Europe, often over their protests. The U.S. would not be the superpower it is today if it had followed what Europe had insisted were its "intellectual property" rights.
My other general example is similar, except this time the whiner includes the United States. China is fueling a LOT of their growth by "stealing" ideas from the industrialized countries (even as they play lip service to the concepts so that they can get into the WTO so they won't be discriminated against economically). To China, and through most of its history, "intellectual property" is a very foreign concept - they DO have some taboos against fraud-like behavior, but if you tell the common person that they don't have the "right" to make copies of som
But this is key to intellectual property rights. If I truly and completely own the book I purchase, there is absolutely no reason I should not be able to make any changes to that work I see fit. There should be no issue whatsoever with me making changes to a work I own. Fraud only matters when there is value in authorship;...
There IS no issue with you making changes to a work you own. The issue is only whether you misrepresent the value of the product by using disinformation when you sell it to someone else. That is fraud, whether or not the product you sell has "intellectual property" encoded on it, and is orthogonal to the issue of intellectual property.
A fair enough divergence of opinion. I happen to believe that a software developer who spends two years of his life developing a complex, well-written, useful, popular application deserves something more than to have random strangers pick his product up and give it away for free on the Internet.
There are a lot of people who give up years of their life to try and start small businesses, but because of bad luck, bad decisions, or aggressive competition, they lose everything (including possibly any personal assets). Nobody assumes that these people should receive government handouts or special government laws to protect them to make sure their endeavor suceeds. Just the same as the work someone does to put together a small business, there's nothing special about the work that your hypothetical software developer did, either. If he/she can't sell it to anyone for a price that's worth all the effort, then the developer made a bad investment of their time & resources. There's no reason for government enforcement to make sure that such activities succeed.
In the absence of government enforcement of artificial order,
Yeah, yeah - the old "property is just a legal definition too" comeback...just about every stable civilization on the planet has strong laws against the use of violence, as just about stable society in history has agreed that the use of violence as a mechanism for social order has not resulted in a net benefit to the society as a whole. Once you eliminate the "might makes right" social structure, then the "natural" behavior of private property & free markets becomes apparent. "I can't take that thing from you by force, so to get it from you, I have to offer you something that you will think is of equal value."
I think you'll find a LOT more people agreeing about the benefit of basic property law to society than any supposed benefit that "intellectual property" laws provide.
The intellectual property laws were born out of a desire to control what people were publishing (by European royals), and refined by an industry who saw a way to force people to pay far beyond what they would normally be willing to pay in a free market. They use "think of the poor, starving musicians & arts" as their emotional meme to get people to overlook how basic property rights are being violated, and their position as the "mouthpiece of mass-media" to make sure the lawmakers are friendly to their interests over that of the general society.
use of the phrase "most honest, hard-working people" isn't so much a way to bolster one's argument
Touche - "honest, hard-working people" has become my personal codeword for people who simply provide a good or service & expect to be paid at an amount their customers think the good or service is worth, i.e., they don't expect anything more than that kind of transaction.
I think that someone who expects to be paid a lot of money just because they worked hard, whether or not the thing they produced or the service they provided was worth that much to anyone, is at the very least guilty of misjudging the "value" of their product or service, and at the worst guilty of acting greedily (especially if they rely on government enforcement to MAKE those people p
Although I don't use (and in some cases understand:-) half the stuff they taught me, I feel like the act of trying to understand it increased my ability to understand a larger range of concepts - kind of like working out to increase muscle capacity.
And the half that I _do_ use turned out be useful at occasionally very unexpected places. So I'm hopeful that I might be able to use some of the other half at some point in my future.
I would support removing all forms of transaction-based taxes (which, by definition, create impediments to the economy), in return for a regularly-collected X% percent asset tax (expansion of concept of "property" tax to all ownable assets) for all entities legally-defined to be able to own property, with a large exemption for real people but no other loopholes. X would be adjusted so that the typical tax load on individuals is the same as it is now, or to whatever level is necessary to balance the budget, whichever is smaller.
This would encourage a more liquid & distributed economy (preventing stagnant accumulation of wealth - assuming there is a system in place to channel the collected resources to stimulate the economy from the bottom up, of course), and prevent the extremely well-to-do from "hiding" their income in trusts/holding companies/tax shelters/etc - since any such legal entity capable of "owning" property would be taxed at the full percentage rate. Basically, to claim ownership of property would automatically indicate who would have to pay taxes on that property.
Just another proposal to throw into the ring of memes...
Why should it be illegal for me to change the title and author? I own that book. What does it matter who wrote it in the first place if I own it? Who the heck are you to tell me I can't change it however I see fit? How can it be a crime for me to make changes to my own book?
Make all the changes you want. Just don't try and misrepresent to a potential buyer that the product hasn't been changed. That would be fraud, and is orthogonal to the issue of private property rights.
So you're basically saying that while it's normal for honest, hard-working cabinetmakers to expect to be paid for each widget they sell to a person, your honest, hard-working author or musician can only be expected to be paid the first time they sell their product to somebody, simply because the fruits of their honest, hard work can be reproduced with trivial effort whereas the cabinetmaker's finished product cannot.
No, I'm saying that a honest, hard-working musician should expect to get paid for their PERFORMANCE, i.e., for providing a service - not for the contents of the music they are playing. If they sell copies of the performance, then they shouldn't expect to be paid for anything more than what people are willing to pay for a copy of a performance.
Your argument is actually more suited to composers & authors, but that doesn't change my argument. People should get compensated for providing desired goods or services. If they want to keep getting paid, then they have to keep providing desired goods or services. It really is that simple.
I believe that intangible things like music and software are fundamentally different from physical goods
By "fundamentally different", I assume you mean "more valuable than people would be willing to pay for in a normal free market system". I believe that you (and intellectual property proponents) have a grossly-inflated view of the "value" of such works. In the absence of government enforcement of artificial monopoly, the value of such work is exactly dictated by what people are willing to pay for it. This is the "natural" value of any product or service. If your "product" has to receive special privileged enforcement by the government to be worth a higher price, then it isn't worth as much as you think it is.
For instance, I might firmly believe that the air I exhale is worth $1mil per gram. For some reason, no one is willing to pay that price - so, by hook or crook, I get a law passed requiring anyone breathing the same air that I do to pay me for consuming my valuable exhalations. Do you _really_ think my exhalations have truly become worth $1mil/gram?
perfectly reasonable for an artist's work to enjoy legal protection from having some large, rich entity simply appropriate their work and pass it off however they see fit, with no compensation to the creator whatsoever.
This attempt at an emotional appeal is irrelevant to the argument. If a large rich organization tries to pass off someone's work as their own, then they would be committing fraud, and should be held criminally liable. If a composer or author publishes something, then they should expect to be paid only by the person who buys it from them - once it has been sold, they shouldn't expect to get paid _every_ time someone somewhere makes another copy of it.
should counterfeiting be illegal?
This example is irrelevant to your argument too, since it also qualifies as fraud. As an aside, it is perfectly legal to create your own currency system (some neighborhoods do this for a barter/goods/service-type solution to try and encourage intra-neighborhood commercse). It is only illegal to try and defraud people by using fake currency.
Can you really not see any tangible difference between a physical good and an artistic work?
No. And I don't think they should be treated differently.
People who DO think they should be treated differently are essentially asking for special privileges for a particular class of product, and there is no demonstrated societal reason why such special privileges (which override normal right to use one's own private property) should be granted (and plenty of anecdotal abuse to indicate that such privileges shouldn't have been granted).
If I spend two years of my life developing an awesome piece of software, should I really be expected to only ever sell it to one person?
If you did, you'd better make sure you sell it for enough to make all that effort worthwhile. If you can't find anyone who will buy it at that price, then you screwed up - just like any other craftsperson who creates something that no one will buy at the price they are selling.
Because by your reasoning, once I've sold a copy my software, whoever bought it is perfectly justified in kicking it up onto the 'Net and handing it out to whomever the hell they please, because they paid for a copy of it, right?
Yep, because after they paid you for it, it became their property, so they should be able to do whatever they want to it that anyone would normally expect to do with their own private property. If you have a business model which depends on being able to control what your customers do with their own private property (without entering a contract with your customers) - well, your business model sucks. Any business model which requires that the government make people pay for reasons that they wouldn't do normally is problematic, and should by default not be supported.
Would you argue that it's OK for me to buy a copy of The Shining, by Stephen King, change the title and author to Apocalypse, Baby!, by Jimmy Phallus, and sell it online for fifty cents a pop?
Mispresenting who wrote a work falls under "fraud" laws, which is a separate issue from private property rights.
Aside from that, as long as you don't commit fraud, if you bought it, and you can afford to make copies of it, then you should be able to sell or give away those copies as you please. If people think your service is worth it, they'll pay you for the service of providing those copies.
Most honest, hard-working people expect to get compensated for providing a desired good or service. They also understand that they will not get compensated if people do not find their good or service desirable enough at the price that they are charging. Is this so hard to understand?
Only "intellectual property owners" expect to get paid over and over, every time their "property" is distributed by 3rd parties, even though the effort to create that product only occurred once. And the government enforces such a business model by riding roughshod over private property rights.
Slashdot Mirror
If the system was working the way it was supposed to, this patent & 90% of the others would be laughed out of the Patent Office front door.
The fact that the _backup_ system (the U.S. Court of Appeals) managed to work in THIS ONE CASE, hardly means that the system is working the way it's supposed to.
Gene therapy using viruses has failed because the body attacks the modified virus.
Really? I thought it was because they didn't have a way to control WHERE the genes got inserted, and sometimes they ended up getting inserted in a place that caused leukemia.
Or maybe both were problems?
Depends on who they think are the bigger thieves.
If Microsoft ticks them off enough, then they decide that rewarding homegrown thieves are more palatable than becoming Microsoft's puppy dog.
All this is besides the point, though.
All I was trying to point out is, for a company which depends on intellectual property law for its business model, maintaining good relations with the lawmakers who prop up that business model is an absolute requirement.
Unlike for normal manufacturers or service providers, where they can stop providing the goods or service if they don't get paid, Microsoft has no short-term control over their product without the willing enforcements of the government.
Oh, and one more link, talking about more than just the Windows OS:
n dows/story/0,10801,96047,00.html
http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/os/wi
http://www.techweb.com/wire/ebiz/159903411
It might not be complete sharing, but it IS available.
Plus, there's the code from whoever cracked into Microsoft's development servers:
http://www.crn.vnunet.com/news/1152775
If the EU grants immunity (and maybe a big amount of Euros) to whoever gives them the code, I'm sure they could get their hands on it.
All this really points out is how ephemeral a "retail" software developer's business model really is. If the government doesn't prop such a business model up, then there's really nothing that the company can do to control their "product" once it leaves their immediate control.
The source code is already rambling around universities & various agencies there. No reason to send anyone anywhere.
What point would that serve? The EU could just forcibly Open Source everything that Microsoft-Europe has on the spot, and Microsoft would become a completely ephemeral entity as far as the EU was concerned.
I find it cool when I know that the equipment around me is processing so much information, I get the subjective feeling that time/space around me is being warped due to the information density...
I'm not sure what your point is - just because corporations pay taxes doesn't make them any more of a "real" person. Unlike a real person, the government could easily pass laws which force corporations give 100% of all of their assets to the government, and the corporations would not have any inherent "rights" to prevent that.
You mean a limitation on a copyright holder's privileges.
Nobody has a "right" to control copying (even given the misleading name for it) - they are granted the privilege of controlling it with the goal of benefiting society.
Just sounds like a complicated way of making a difficult-to-defeat authentication.
There's lots of clever crypto guys who should be able to come up with something for digital data that is as tough to defeat.
It feels good to invoke Godwin's Law if you don't want to talk about the scary stuff, doesn't it?
I've got a problem with the feedback system involved with speed tickets - the fact that a lot of police departments have a big chunk of their budget dependent on the revenue from speeding tickets. That kind of feedback loop will inevitably cause the police to find reasons to give people speeding tickets, to set up situations where it is highly probable that people would probably speed, and in extreme cases, to flat-out lie that people where speeding (and get them in a front of a traffic judge who likes those kickbacks).
Enforcing speeding laws is a reasonable way to catch irresponsible drivers, but the police should balance the relative benefits of enforcing such laws with the benefits of enforcing other normal safety laws (like catching murders, rapists, muggers, robbers, etc), without having to take into account their budget requirements.
I believe most of the modern proposed RFID solutions have protection against induced voltages - even after putting them in a microwave.
Nothing that a mallet and a nail punch wouldn't solve though.
What exactly is a "gross profit margin"?
How does it compare to "net profit"?
As somebody who believes in private property rights, I think I should be allowed to do whatever I want with my private property (e.g., make copies up the wazoo if I want to), as long as it doesn't violate the safety or rights of someone else.
"Intellectual property" laws violate private property rights. There's no reason to feel guilty about being annoyed with laws that are designed to give control over your private property to someone who you've never signed a contract with.
Nobody has the "right" to determine distribution except for the person who is doing the distributing.
Now, the legal system grants the PRIVILEGE of determining distribution, in a failed experiment to encourage creativity, but it is not a RIGHT (regardless of what the name says).
Dunno...if I were forced to jump a shark, the LAST thing I'd want is for them to have friggin' lasers mounted on their heads!
I didn't say that all the useful stuff I learned at college was learned in a classroom...
That's one way, or you use your expertise to construct tools which you use to provide services for efficiently than your competitors. Or you can provide a one-shot programming solution for an up front charge. Or be on retainer. In other words, you will be compensated for providing a desired good or service, just like every other craftsperson on the planet. Just don't expect to sell a product on a store shelf for more than people are willing to pay for the copy. If you want to KEEP getting paid, then you will have to keep producing desired goods & services - just like every other craftsperson on the planet.
I am a CAD developer working for a chip-making company. I got most of my skills by playing around with computers since I was little, going to school, and from my work experience. I get paid a salary to write software for them. If I stopped writing software for them, I would expect them to stop paying me - I would not expect them to keep paying me every time they used my software (unless I had convinced them to sign a contract with me that said so).
There is absolutely no reason why "knowledge workers" need special protection for their work, other than the desire of some people to leverage more money out of such work than the free market would be willing to normally pay.
Only if you judge by the memes spread by the mass media, which is all controlled by people who have a vested interest in maintaining strong controls over the channels of information flow. If you look past the spin, however, you'll note that most people figure they should be able to do what they want with their own private property, and pay little attention to the laws which say they can't make copies of whatever for themselves. Even people who don't use P2P generally do so because they think, like yourself, that creators need a subsidy to keep creating - and not specifically because they think that "intellectual property" is REAL property and that it should be treated as such. And the huge number of people who DO use P2P generally think that all the "intellectual property" propaganda is just B.S., and that they should be able to do what they want with their own private property.
To properly evaluate whether "intellectual property" laws result in a net benefit or loss to a society, you need to compare societies with & without them (assuming that such laws are actually being enforced). I've got two general examples which I usually drag out to illustrate my point: when the U.S. was very young, a great deal of its rapid growth was due to the fact that it heavily "stole" industrial ideas from Europe, often over their protests. The U.S. would not be the superpower it is today if it had followed what Europe had insisted were its "intellectual property" rights.
My other general example is similar, except this time the whiner includes the United States. China is fueling a LOT of their growth by "stealing" ideas from the industrialized countries (even as they play lip service to the concepts so that they can get into the WTO so they won't be discriminated against economically). To China, and through most of its history, "intellectual property" is a very foreign concept - they DO have some taboos against fraud-like behavior, but if you tell the common person that they don't have the "right" to make copies of som
There IS no issue with you making changes to a work you own. The issue is only whether you misrepresent the value of the product by using disinformation when you sell it to someone else. That is fraud, whether or not the product you sell has "intellectual property" encoded on it, and is orthogonal to the issue of intellectual property.
There are a lot of people who give up years of their life to try and start small businesses, but because of bad luck, bad decisions, or aggressive competition, they lose everything (including possibly any personal assets). Nobody assumes that these people should receive government handouts or special government laws to protect them to make sure their endeavor suceeds. Just the same as the work someone does to put together a small business, there's nothing special about the work that your hypothetical software developer did, either. If he/she can't sell it to anyone for a price that's worth all the effort, then the developer made a bad investment of their time & resources. There's no reason for government enforcement to make sure that such activities succeed.
Yeah, yeah - the old "property is just a legal definition too" comeback...just about every stable civilization on the planet has strong laws against the use of violence, as just about stable society in history has agreed that the use of violence as a mechanism for social order has not resulted in a net benefit to the society as a whole. Once you eliminate the "might makes right" social structure, then the "natural" behavior of private property & free markets becomes apparent. "I can't take that thing from you by force, so to get it from you, I have to offer you something that you will think is of equal value."
I think you'll find a LOT more people agreeing about the benefit of basic property law to society than any supposed benefit that "intellectual property" laws provide.
The intellectual property laws were born out of a desire to control what people were publishing (by European royals), and refined by an industry who saw a way to force people to pay far beyond what they would normally be willing to pay in a free market. They use "think of the poor, starving musicians & arts" as their emotional meme to get people to overlook how basic property rights are being violated, and their position as the "mouthpiece of mass-media" to make sure the lawmakers are friendly to their interests over that of the general society.
Touche - "honest, hard-working people" has become my personal codeword for people who simply provide a good or service & expect to be paid at an amount their customers think the good or service is worth, i.e., they don't expect anything more than that kind of transaction.
I think that someone who expects to be paid a lot of money just because they worked hard, whether or not the thing they produced or the service they provided was worth that much to anyone, is at the very least guilty of misjudging the "value" of their product or service, and at the worst guilty of acting greedily (especially if they rely on government enforcement to MAKE those people p
Depends on how seriously you took the education.
:-) half the stuff they taught me, I feel like the act of trying to understand it increased my ability to understand a larger range of concepts - kind of like working out to increase muscle capacity.
Although I don't use (and in some cases understand
And the half that I _do_ use turned out be useful at occasionally very unexpected places. So I'm hopeful that I might be able to use some of the other half at some point in my future.
I would support removing all forms of transaction-based taxes (which, by definition, create impediments to the economy), in return for a regularly-collected X% percent asset tax (expansion of concept of "property" tax to all ownable assets) for all entities legally-defined to be able to own property, with a large exemption for real people but no other loopholes. X would be adjusted so that the typical tax load on individuals is the same as it is now, or to whatever level is necessary to balance the budget, whichever is smaller.
This would encourage a more liquid & distributed economy (preventing stagnant accumulation of wealth - assuming there is a system in place to channel the collected resources to stimulate the economy from the bottom up, of course), and prevent the extremely well-to-do from "hiding" their income in trusts/holding companies/tax shelters/etc - since any such legal entity capable of "owning" property would be taxed at the full percentage rate. Basically, to claim ownership of property would automatically indicate who would have to pay taxes on that property.
Just another proposal to throw into the ring of memes...
Make all the changes you want. Just don't try and misrepresent to a potential buyer that the product hasn't been changed. That would be fraud, and is orthogonal to the issue of private property rights.
No, I'm saying that a honest, hard-working musician should expect to get paid for their PERFORMANCE, i.e., for providing a service - not for the contents of the music they are playing. If they sell copies of the performance, then they shouldn't expect to be paid for anything more than what people are willing to pay for a copy of a performance.
Your argument is actually more suited to composers & authors, but that doesn't change my argument. People should get compensated for providing desired goods or services. If they want to keep getting paid, then they have to keep providing desired goods or services. It really is that simple.
By "fundamentally different", I assume you mean "more valuable than people would be willing to pay for in a normal free market system". I believe that you (and intellectual property proponents) have a grossly-inflated view of the "value" of such works. In the absence of government enforcement of artificial monopoly, the value of such work is exactly dictated by what people are willing to pay for it. This is the "natural" value of any product or service. If your "product" has to receive special privileged enforcement by the government to be worth a higher price, then it isn't worth as much as you think it is.
For instance, I might firmly believe that the air I exhale is worth $1mil per gram. For some reason, no one is willing to pay that price - so, by hook or crook, I get a law passed requiring anyone breathing the same air that I do to pay me for consuming my valuable exhalations. Do you _really_ think my exhalations have truly become worth $1mil/gram?
This attempt at an emotional appeal is irrelevant to the argument. If a large rich organization tries to pass off someone's work as their own, then they would be committing fraud, and should be held criminally liable. If a composer or author publishes something, then they should expect to be paid only by the person who buys it from them - once it has been sold, they shouldn't expect to get paid _every_ time someone somewhere makes another copy of it.
This example is irrelevant to your argument too, since it also qualifies as fraud. As an aside, it is perfectly legal to create your own currency system (some neighborhoods do this for a barter/goods/service-type solution to try and encourage intra-neighborhood commercse). It is only illegal to try and defraud people by using fake currency.
No. And I don't think they should be treated differently.
People who DO think they should be treated differently are essentially asking for special privileges for a particular class of product, and there is no demonstrated societal reason why such special privileges (which override normal right to use one's own private property) should be granted (and plenty of anecdotal abuse to indicate that such privileges shouldn't have been granted).
If you did, you'd better make sure you sell it for enough to make all that effort worthwhile. If you can't find anyone who will buy it at that price, then you screwed up - just like any other craftsperson who creates something that no one will buy at the price they are selling.
Yep, because after they paid you for it, it became their property, so they should be able to do whatever they want to it that anyone would normally expect to do with their own private property. If you have a business model which depends on being able to control what your customers do with their own private property (without entering a contract with your customers) - well, your business model sucks. Any business model which requires that the government make people pay for reasons that they wouldn't do normally is problematic, and should by default not be supported.
Mispresenting who wrote a work falls under "fraud" laws, which is a separate issue from private property rights.
Aside from that, as long as you don't commit fraud, if you bought it, and you can afford to make copies of it, then you should be able to sell or give away those copies as you please. If people think your service is worth it, they'll pay you for the service of providing those copies.
Most honest, hard-working people expect to get compensated for providing a desired good or service. They also understand that they will not get compensated if people do not find their good or service desirable enough at the price that they are charging. Is this so hard to understand?
Only "intellectual property owners" expect to get paid over and over, every time their "property" is distributed by 3rd parties, even though the effort to create that product only occurred once. And the government enforces such a business model by riding roughshod over private property rights.