I don’t disagree with your post, but keep in mind that China also moved quickly into the 21st Century by the theft of the West’s patents and copyright monopolies. It stole microelectronics, aeronautics, communications, and missile technology while it hide behind its state run economy.

Notice how music has been the most vocal about piracy. That’s because other industries sill provide services they can charge for without tipping the scales in their favor. You can’t film a movie for as little as you can make a CD. People pay good money for the movie theater “experience”. Downloaded movies don’t look like blu-rays. Studios solve these problems and I am perfectly willing to pay for their services.

So a note to music labels — You, like so many things, have been replaced by the internet. Your services are no longer needed. Good day.

It is time to create a direct encrypted pipeline from major American cities to a locale with uncorrupted Government. From there, connections to the rest of the world could take place. Permitting any processing in the USA means accepting Government takeover. Centralization is the enemy of freedom and creativity.

This is a technical issue that arises above the political (“legal”) ones. The key is to dump everything that is related to “cloud” computing or storage. Once you permit centralization within an unfree State, you permanently lose your technological freedom. Buy and maintain linux systems with strong encryption and subscribe to overseas secure services in a political entity that allows freedom from Government surveillance of your computing.

The important thing to remember is that the copyright owners in this industry are the distributors of content and not the creators of content. Typically, creative artists are horribly used by publishers, record companies, and movie distributors. Typically, creative artists receive only a small share of the proceeds of their work. The Internet is a “disruptive innovation” which potentially offers a distribution system that requires a much smaller middle-man infrastructure between the creative artist and the audience than what is currently provided by a publisher, record company, or movie distributor. (Did you know that independently produced movies are distributed by the big studios, because that is the only way to get movies into theaters?)

What about where someone acquires the rights to water, or the air we breathe, and then extracts from us, through the police powers of the judicial system, a daily toll on drinking water or breathing air?

There is a theory or philosophy that says that we humans gain all our ideas not from within ourselves, but rather from the world we see. Like the Beatles learning from Little Richard, who learned from other musicians.

This intellectual property boom, is not unlike the Alaska Gold Rush, where anybody with larceny in their heart just walks in an claims something as their own, even though they did not make it.

Our legal system is allowing anybody that can afford a high-powered law firm to stake a claim to anything, even staking a claim to DNA, or the cells of a natural organism.

“Intellectual property” is a gigantic scam. The wealthy benefit, the courts benefit, the law firms benefit, the politicians in their employ benefit. But the ordinary citizen is harmed immensely by the tolls extracted from them on a daily basis, all in the name of “intellectual property”.

Capitalism is a very powerful force of nature. Capitalism is as old as mankind. The accumulation of surplus human production into stores of surplus grain, or silver, or cattle, and the lending of that capital to a relative or other person, at interest, is a calculated human behavior older than the pyramids of Egypt. For good or bad, capitalism is a productive force, characterized by efficiency.

Copyrights and patents are not part of natural capitalism, but are rather antithetical to capitalism. Copyrights and patents are monopolies granted by governments to favored parties. This is the opposite of capitalism.

The popular misconception is that a people will not be productive without patents and copyright monopolies. The truth is that humans are by nature very industrious naturally.

Look at China, which has become so productive without patent and copyright monopolies. Look at all the workers in your life that are getting up early, to work hard at building houses, or running railroads, or growing crops, or cooking meals. They are all working extremely hard without any enticement of copyrights or patent rights.

Even artists such as musicians or painters or sculptors are driven by their own internal creative forces. Most of them would continue to work hard no matter what.

Large media corporations often produce lousy art, whereas a lone artist may create good things. Where the large media corporations excel, like the patent troll companies, is in the arcane arts of greed and lobbying.

As if redistributing what can be watched for free on Youtube (most of which is uploaded illegally anyway) constitutes a lost sale! I say that we vote with our wallets and boycott the music/movie industry. It’d being the moguls to their knees in a very short time. Meanwhile. artists would soon find they are better off without those douche bags. Enough is enough.