just because that work was "creative"? 

That's where the IP theory all falls down. Originality or uniqueness doesn't exists, creation is all about recreating from what you learned from others. Creation is stealing in a moral and respectful way. Protecting your creations with IP laws is immoral and unrespectful against your public and previous artists you took from

That's a straw man. Copyright doesn't prohibit someone from learning from your work. It prohibits (in the US) five specific acts: reproduction, preparation of derivative works, distribution of copies, public performance, and display. You don't need to be able to define a work of purely unique expression. All you need to be able to do is define when a work is sufficiently original that it's not a derivative work or reproduction.

1. Protecting with IP ¡= Copyright

2. I didn't say Copyright prevents others from learning

3. A work is never sufficiently original, it's always a derivative

> The vast majority of human expression was created before the concept of "IP" existed. The business models we've had in the last few hundred years are the aberration, not the other way around.

That's probably not true, for two reasons. The general reason is that most of anything was created recently, due to the exponential growth of human population and society. The specific reason is that copyright was developed hand-in-hand with the technology for creating easily-reproduced works.

> Shouldn't the laborers who carried the stones to build a bridge be entitled to an ongoing royalty paid by everyone who crosses?

There are, of course, toll bridges and roads, including private ones. (The fact that the laborer doesn’t get the payment is a function of the arrangement between the laborer and the person who owns the bridge, not a function of the nature of the property right.)

>There are, of course, toll bridges and roads, including private ones. (The fact that the laborer doesn’t get the payment is a function of the arrangement between the laborer and the person who owns the bridge, not a function of the nature of the property right.)

You mean like publishers and creators?

The automatic status of property rights and protection by both government and industry inherent within the long established framework of IP is very functionally different in nature from a labourer attempting to arrange an adhoc right to payment from future travellers for work they have put into a bridge.

> Shouldn't the laborers who carried the stones to build a bridge be entitled to an ongoing royalty paid by everyone who crosses?

Creators are actually mostly in the same class as the laborers - neither one gets recurring payments, as they've both likely sold the rights to their product for a more immediate payment. The ultimate goal of these laws is to create a formal title that can be bought up by the rent-seeking class.

> Shouldn't the laborers who carried the stones to build a bridge be entitled to an ongoing royalty paid by everyone who crosses?

If that laborer decided that his works had to be pay that way, sure.

> How is it "fair" that someone should be entitled to profit again-and-again from a single act of work, just because that work was "creative"?

What he does is owned by himself. He shared it with you on a specific terms, that you don't share it with anyone else.

He profit again and again from his single act of work, because that's how he decided to sell it. There's millions that does a work, sell it and are done with it. I do it everyday at work, I do 8 hours of software development and that source code is now the property of the company where I work. That's my choice though.

You're making my point. It's not a matter of "fairness", as the OP was suggesting. It's a matter of market custom. There is no natural law that says that royalty-based payment systems for "intellectual property" work are required. It's a custom.

Skilled stone Masons are paid for the "transaction" of laying stones.

A music streaming "transaction" pays an Artist $0.005, on a good day. Not enough to make a living and sustain cultural values.

From your profile “A boring, not-young, not-cool, not-working-at-a-startup IT generalist.”

Do you expect people to pay for your work? Do you voluntarily give your labor away for free? Do you sell software?

I sell my time, by the hour or by the deliverable. I expect to be paid once (and only once) for work I perform. Sometimes I give away my labor for causes I consider worthy. In general, unless I've got a contract that specifies how I'm paid I don't on spec. I don't feel any entitlement to compensation for work performed outside such an agreement.

All work I produce for profit is expressly for-hire and "owned" by the paying Customer. I've got no rights in the products of my work. I've never produced work that my Customers have subsequently licensed or sold, nor would I take on such work. There's plenty of work to do w/o going down that distasteful road.

Any software, writing, photography, music, and other creative endeavors that I've pursued in my personal time and that I have distributed have been permissively licensed or disclaimed to be in the public domain. Fundamentally, I believe an idea can't be "owned". Anything I communicate to others is no longer "mine". It belongs to humanity. Attribution of authorship has a moral component to me (i.e. plagiarism is morally wrong), but making derivative works or exact copies of the works of others isn't wrong. All human expression is derivative.

The current copyright regime in the United States is such a perversion of the original intent that I consider it immoral to participate in it for profit and I have varying degrees of contempt for those people or companies who do. The social contract is skewed too far from the benefit of the public, in favor of the entrenched copyright interests (who, by and large, aren't creators). If the copyright regime were returned to the original term and renewal I might change my opinion, though I still wouldn't participate personally. That would, at least, bring works into the public domain in a sensible time period.

By and large the "entertainment industry" is the object of my ire, because their lobby has been the one seeking to increase copyright terms and to make draconian laws, like the DMCA, to limit individual rights. I think the "tech industry", as we know it, would function in substantially the same manner w/ shorter copyright terms (and w/o software or business process patents-- though that's not really what we're talking about here).

Have I benefited from the current copyright regime? Sure. A lot of the work that I do involves support of non-Free software. Like I said-- if we went back to sensible copyright terms I think the tech industry would be mostly the same.

Perhaps I'm a hypocrite who can't ever be redeemed for working in the tech industry. I was born into the "IP" regime that exists today (at least, prior to the Sonny Bono copyright extension act and the DMCA), but I'm trying to navigate it with the moral compass that I've got.

>Creators aren't entitled to a "fair" world. Nobody is.

This is psychopathic. Everyone deserves a fair world. That's a huge part of what society is all about. "All men are created equal" is a great thing for a society to aspire to.

I think you're conflating "deserved" with "entitled", when they're not the same at all. Deservedness is more an ideal concerning what one is merited, whereas entitlement is the practical application of "what is yours by legal right". Placing entitlement on intellectual property is - and always has been - a grey area, as there's no physical limitations preventing two people from having a roughly similar idea. There's plenty of limitations preventing two people from owning the same phone, car, or home.

>>Creators aren't entitled to a "fair" world.

>This is psychopathic.

You cannot imagine an interpretation of his words that makes them not psychopathic?