Right now the industry is doing the equivalent of adding an 18% gratuity to a take-out order.

Only there's no effort on their side to take your order, and it's way more than 18%.

If you disagree with their business practices then boycott them and use your money to support alternatives. Stealing their stuff just empowers them to get dumb laws passed.

Infringement is not theft. Even narrowly legally, and certainly not morally or ethically. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_%28198...

However, strict ideas of "Intellectual Property" can constitute suppression of freedom of speech. That's a principle we can all get behind. "Intellectual Property" is at least moderately un-American.

That's a bunch of self-justifying sophistry.

Let me guess - you either don't write software for a living or you're lucky enough to write the kind of software that can't easily be copied?

It's not self-justifying sophistry. Most things (including software) get invented independently multiple times. I've done it myself. Independent invention invalidates any moral claims to "intellectual property". The massive costs to society mean that we all have to (reluctantly) acknowledge that an "ownership of ideas" can't really be enforced practically. Enforcement of ownership of ideas would entail no civil liberty at all.

I don't write software for a living right now, but I have in the past. Go right ahead and take a look: http://stratigery.com/source.html Take a copy, too. On the house.

You're confusing copyrights and patents. I agree that nobody should be able to own an idea, at least in software, but suggesting that nobody can own an implementation is naive anarchism.

OK, I'll bite. How can I tell if I've re-invented your (wholly-owned) implementation? If I actually come up with a way to do some particular task without consulting php.net (or whatever) what's to keep me from (very inadvertently) "stealing" your implementation?

I'll give you an example: a while back I wrote some code in C, to push an element on to a linked list. I forget exactly why, but I ended up passing the head of the linked list as a "struct list " or something like that. That project died, but I kept the function just because I was so proud of it.

Years later, I saw a programming quiz. The question was almost exactly my task. The answer to the question was my function, with the variables renamed.

Independent invention. It ruins "Intellectual Property" as property.

And yes, I'm deliberating conflating copyright and patents, because the rest of the world does so. It's "World Intellectual Property Organization", not dual "World Patent Property Organization" and "World Copyright Property Organization".

I don't write software that people want to copy, but there are people that do, and still take the grandparents' stance:

http://torrentfreak.com/piracy-is-theft-ridiculous-lost-sale...

Copyright extension started way before "stealing their stuff" was widespread. Let's talk about the "billions" of dollars of stuff legally "stolen" from the public domain.

I guess I should point out that I don't pirate software or music. The only music I download is stuff I can't be arsed to rip from a disc (It's actually faster now to download it, anyway - funny world we live in.) or stuff that hasn't been released on anything newer than cassette.

Supporting piracy is supporting an alternative. Piracy along with donating directly to the artist seems to be a great solution for many consumers that I know personally.

> Stealing their stuff just empowers them to get dumb laws passed.

Theft is the removal of ownership. It's not stealing, it's copying.

You sound like you might be a musician/artist. It's really a shame at how many artists are angry at consumers because of piracy. Record labels love this, because you're fighting their battles for them. They're using artists' anger of THEM not paying artists, and projecting it onto piracy.

1) Musicians should be angry with their labels. 2) Musicians should not buy into the bullshit that piracy is decreasing their cut. "Hey man, we'd pay you more, but there's so much piracy going on! The revenues aren't there! You should be mad at the pirates."

I've worked in the film, video game, and now music software businesses, all of which suffer heavily from piracy.

The ironic thing is that all the defenders of "free culture" piracy do is drive creators into the arms of Orwellian walled gardens like iTunes and empower legislators to write dumb laws like SOPA.

I don't see a whole lot of new artists in the Hot 100 list who are making it big going at it alone.

Maybe they are't as pissed off at the labels as you think?

> Maybe they are't as pissed off at the labels as you think?

Many are incredibly pissed at the payment structures. Take a look: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120622/16193319442/myth-d...

TLDR: Spotify has been accused of barely paying artists, when in fact they pay the labels, who in turn barely pay the artists. But if you search for artists who hate Spotify because of their low income, you'll find plenty of rants.

Sounds like the benefits of signing up to a label outweigh the downsides...hence why they are still signing up for labels in the first place. Everything might not be puppy dogs and ice cream between the artists and the labels, but the current popular are have still signed to the majors because they provide the backing and infrastructure to take them to the next level which they don't think they can do on their own.