Some good points, although I would take a more nuanced view in some cases. For instance (and trying to keep this somewhat related to hacker news, lest it degrade into a political debate):
Intellectual property was and is a compromise designed to foster the private provisioning of what are essentially "public goods" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good). It's easy to argue that the compromise has tilted too far in favor of producers, but abolishing those protections instead of limiting them might be a step too far in the other direction.
How is intellectual property a public good issue? It's easy to, for example, sell a book to a single person, with a contract written to protect the author (from distribution of copies, or whatever).
A public good issue is, say, when you build a dam that helps an entire flood valley, and people living there can get the benefit of your work without paying you, by refusing to agree to any contract with you. I don't see that an author faces that kind of issue.
Enforcing a contract is another matter, and has become very hard for some types of intellectual property, but that is different than a public good problem, in which no one is breaking the law.
Books aren't the "problem": digital content is. Digital content is certainly non-rivalrous - if I download a copy of a movie, it's not affecting anyone else's ability to use their own copy. The tricker one is excludability. It's sort of possible with digital goods, but it doesn't work very well, and it appears to be working less well the more people get access to fast connections and lose their qualms about copying things.
It's a tough problem. People like Stallman would like to have the government step in and take charge (if I've understood his position correctly), but I think that's a terrible solution. You could just leave things to "Coasian solutions", which is what a lot of open source software seems to be (the Apache web server, for instance), but you would probably never get stuff like the things Apple produces in that case. Custom software, governed by contracts between two parties, probably wouldn't suffer as much.
OK, I just don't think that the difficulty of enforcing certain legal contracts, should be conflated with a public good problem. It's fundamentally a different kind of issue.
Music downloaders are not free riders. They've broken the law (at least the uploader has clearly broken his contract with the artist not to do this). In a classic public good case, like the flood valley and dam, the difficulty is that people who own property in the valley, and break no laws by continuing to farm there, benefit from the flood control that the dam owner can't prevent from affecting their property.
Which is only a problem because it gives them an incentive to get their neighbors to pay for the dam, while not doing so themselves.
Actually copyright exists so that producers don't have to simply rely on contracts, and so that the people doing the copying have breached law and not just the person who breached their contract. The alternative is restricting access to copyrighted material via harsh contracts and supervised access.
As a copyright producer of both music and software I really feel copyright protection is moral and just. The damages awarded for copyright infringement for personal use are clearly ridiculous and should be seriously limited. Also I think both copyrights and patents terms should be reduced and the originality threshold for patents has to be increased. Each patent term should be determined separately with reference to how expensive something has been to bring to market and how novel it is.
Your argument in favor of copyright amounts to "As someone who benefits from foo, I support it," or (rearranged slightly) "I support foo because I benefit from it."
If copyrights are a proper balance, everyone benefits, because more things are created. Without the ability to at least make a living by selling IP, lots of things we currently enjoy/find useful might not exist.
That of course is not to say that the balance is a good one right now, still, it's not just the producers that benefit, it's the public who gets access to things the producer creates because he/she has a means to make some money from it.
I think you're over generalizing I don't listen to music so music IP does not seem to benefit me in any fashion. As to books Shakespeare freely coped from others works which breaks our concept of copyright and he lived without such protection. Yet he has been thought of as the greatest author the western world has ever known for a while.
In my option IP law does little to promote the creation of quality works instead it promotes churning out low quality crap because you must pay before you can view. IMO you could produce a much more effective system by limiting the High Definition version of a movie while not protecting a standard definition copy of a movie. Thus you could watch any movie for free but you would need to pay to see it in HD or in theaters.
You could do the same thing with books and movies. You're free to download a text file but if you want the pictures or fancy formatting you need to buy it. Ditto for low bit rate MP3 vs. lossless copies.
No that's just my context. The extremely abridged version of my argument in that comment is that the alternative to copyright law is some version of contract law and controlled access. You can't force producers to freely release their work, and I doubt you want to stop people entering into contracts with each other.
Sure, good point, but consider that the IP laws that exist in the first place are an attempt to make property out of something where 'property' doesn't really exist in the physical sense. In the case of a book or a song in the era of records, it was a pretty good solution, as enforceable property rights were a pretty good way of encouraging people to produce material that even then could be copied without too much trouble. These days though, that compromise seems to be creaking under the strain of new technology, and is due for a revision.
I'm not sure what the answers are, but I still like the idea of looking at it as a compromise between producers and consumers that should give something to each one. Giving nothing to the producers will discourage production of those kinds of goods. Give too much power to the producers in an age where copying is so easy means using fairly heavy-handed and invasive government power to enforce their rights.
As the music industry is now learning... music is a service, not a product. Its short run as a product (records, tapes, CDs) was an artificial creation that still made some sense when bound to physical media (a product). No one really has a good solution yet, but it seems that information really doesn't like being a product.
Upvoted, because what you said was strictly true and possibly insightful. (Is it still insightful whether the person who coined it actually had the insight that the statement implies?) I'm not really sure what you meant to imply, however, so I hesitated before upvoting.
Actually, I think it would have been more insightful for me to say interpretation isn't free. Dissemination matters, but the interpretation is primary.
Information is inherently free because information is basically numerical, and anyone can (potentially) think of any number. However, information is only useful when the numbers are correlated with actions or objects. It's this correlation that is truly valuable, and the creation of the correlation requires resources (i.e. time and energy).
No, dissemination always consumes resources. I'm not just talking about the resources for sharing files, which are minimal. The real resources consumed are time and energy creating/discovering the information in the first place and putting it in a format that is usable. That's why people need some kind of guaranteed reimbursement for their discoveries and limited IP is a good idea.
I'm a little bit more concerned with software myself. Bands (good ones, especially) can perform to make money. Programmers can't, really. Locking everything up on a server, and only handing out web pages is one answer, I guess...
The uploader hasn't breached a contract under the current system. Copyright law makes contractual agreement unnecessary to the copyright holder. In essence, contractual terms are forced on everyone within the jurisdiction of copyright law regardless of any agreement by the parties to this so-called contract other than the copyright holder. In fact, even the copyright holder hasn't had a chance to determine whether or not agreeing to contractual terms is a good idea: he or she must explicitly declare relinquishment of "contractual" benefits to refuse the contract's terms, and the only means for negotiation of stronger benefits is a lawsuit.
There are not contracts that stand up in court under those circumstances. There clearly is no real contract here -- where "contract" assumes "agreement".
Intellectual property was and is a compromise designed to foster the private provisioning of what are essentially "public goods" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good). It's easy to argue that the compromise has tilted too far in favor of producers, but abolishing those protections instead of limiting them might be a step too far in the other direction.