So... do you want someone to present you with evidence that paying people for their work is a good thing? We're getting to the point of arguing the color of the sky here.

The world doesn't owe you a business model. It's not work if someone doesn't value it, just like a street performer isn't working just because they're putting on a show.

If people can't make money without the government enforcing artificial scarcity of their output, they can always chose another business model.

People with a conscience and an ounce of empathy will always value creative work if they themselves intend to make a profit with it in someway. If you take someone's work, and use it to make money, you should pay them for that work. Its really not that hard of a concept.

>If you take someone's work, and use it to make money, you should pay them for that work. Its really not that hard of a concept.

How many paid products are using foss software without paying the developers. 99%? I do not consider that being evil.

If there are no IP laws nobody will have the expectation to have control over what other people do with their creative output. If you are unwilling to accept that you do not get to make art, the same is true now for art as well. If you do not want someone to make a parody of your art your only option is to never publish it.

> People with a conscience and an ounce of empathy will always value creative work if they themselves intend to make a profit with it in someway.

Is that empathy, or just self interest / good business? If I need a product I can't produce for my business to make a profit I'd better be giving my supplier a cut, lest they stop supplying me. With intangibles it's more fluid than with good bound by scarcity, but novel expressions of creativity become not-novel pretty quickly and, inevitably, you're going to need to go back to the well.

> If people can't make money without the government enforcing artificial scarcity of their output, they can always chose another business model.

Okay, but this literally goes for every single good ever. Case in point: theft. If theft wasn't "arbitrarily" made illegal, then there exists no business models for anything, ever. Because you could just steal it for free.

The idea behind IP is that IP is a good but an ephemeral one, one without a physical manifestation. So, we need to translate a type of theft that works for that.

Or, we could not. But keep in mind IP doesn't just mean music. It means, like... everything that isn't physical. Including my job, and probably your job too.

I think I've spend more on street music than any other music.

Imagine I put up a ghetto blaster and a hat. I play the finest music ever made. Would you put money in the hat? Would the idea to put money in the hat ever cross your mind? Would one even understand they want you to put money in the hat for playing the music?

Moreover, technological progress shouldn't be stifled by attempts to create artificial scarcity by technical means (read: DRM, war on general purpose computing, "The Right to Read", etc).

A lack of IP protection would incentivise even more extreme DRM. DRM exists because copyright law alone is considered insufficient protection by rights holders. A lack of such laws would not get rid of DRM, it would do the opposite.

FOH with that Calvinist nonsense

I do not mind if these artists do not get paid. I absolutely realize that much of corporate art would not exist without IP laws and I accept that.

For books, most of the ones I read are passion projects and if I like them I buy them as thanks to the author/publisher.

I also have absolutely no problem with paying people for their work, I just do not believe they have any rights to their so called "IP".

May I ask what you do for a living?

Research. Which really is an interesting case study. While patents exist, most research is distributed freely, except for a fee to an intermediary for doing absolutely nothing. My ideas are, after I published them, free to use and I have absolutely no right to tell orhers what to do or don't do with this.

Even corporate funded researchers, e.g. for AI, will publish and most of the published results are not protected by patents. Everyone is free to implement someone else's research paper and use it for their own commercial application. Science is also gravitating more to open access, e.g. with arxiv for mathematics and CS. Nobody owns "the right" to some mathematical proof or concept.

Citation is of course encouraged, but plagiarism is not a legal matter, much less a criminal matter.