> I do not believe a content creator has the ethical authority
And here's the crux of our disagreement. You don't believe that the creator should have rights over their creation, perhaps because their creation came to you over a medium that allows for easy duplication.
I (and the US government, clear back to the constitutional convention) believe they should.
The rest of your argument centers on DRM; I agree that DRM is an abomination which should be abolished. It hurts both creators and consumers. But, and this is a big but, it's our own propensity to not respect the rights of the creator which has encouraged the adoption of DRM. If we were were only creating perfect copies of a creative work for the purpose backing it up, I don't think we would be here.
We don't just back it up, though, we create perfect copies and give them away or sell them for our own gain. DRM was originally conceived to stop this, and I have a hard time blaming them for going down that road when we were so blatantly breaking the law and ignoring the rights of the content creators.
We justify it with "it's just ones and zeros", or "information wants to be free", or "they would have made the content anyways"... but that's all it is, a justification. And in my opinion, that justification results in less original content.
That "easy duplication" is entirely the point. The concept of property is based on the limited nature of physical objects. Land, food, books, player piano roles, and DVDs are scarce resources[1]. The zero-sum nature of scarce objects is where concepts like "theft" and "property" apply. We invented the concept of property to manage scarcity.
When dealing with anything that isn't scarce, the entire concept of "property" doesn't apply. Math, for example - those "ones and zeros" - is non-scarce. Teaching someone that 1+2 is 3 doesn't deprive the teacher future use of addition or the numerals 1, 2, or 3. Most reasonable people would agree that nobody gets to claim property rights over math, because it's a non-scarce idea.
> but that's all it is, a justification.
The unwarranted justification is claiming that unlimited ideas are a scarce resource that requires property rights.
> results in less original content.
Do you also complain that teaching algebra - where ideas are copied from teacher to student - results in fewer novel discoveries in mathematics? Just as teaching math tends to lead to more math discoveries, freely using non-scare stories, sounds, music, images, etc, often leads to more content creation. This is so common we invented terms like "remix" and "cover band" to describe some of the ways media is reused.
We can go down this rathole again, or agree to disagree. Btw the law does recognize ownership today.
Given that more content from more people is being created today that at any point in human history runs counter to your statement
Copyright is about protecting the Gatekeepers, the Movies Studios, the Music Labels, the Book Publisher, not about protecting creators.
Karl Fogel does a great job explaining the History of copyright and why is it not needed to protect creators
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhBpI13dxkI
>> it's our own propensity to not respect the rights of the creator which has encouraged the adoption of DRM.
I do not recognize them as rights. Copyright is a Positive Right created by government. I am a supporter of Negative Rights theory and do not support any Positive rights at all
>>The rest of your argument centers on DRM;
it is not just about DRM,DRM is how they attempt to force my property to disobey my commands, it is also about the law the DRM is attempting to enforce on my machine
So if I am walking past a home and they happen to be playing a movie I do not own I some how "owe" the created monetary compensation?
> use their work without paying the creator's asking price.
that depends on how you define use, I do not believe a content creator has the ethical authority to tell me how I can or can not arrange the bits on my computer system, or what order I am allowed to write words on paper I own.
I dont believe a creator should be allowed to use government violence or the threat of government violence to prevent me from downloading instructions from a website that directs my computer to store a series of 1 of 0's in a manner that a translation program can then direct my display to light led's in a specific pattern that many brain will recognize and accept as entertainment
They have the right to ask me to voluntary give them money in exchange for them recording how the computer should store these 1 and 0's but to make it illegal for me to copy this pattern is where I draw the line.