[stonetools]

The Internet is under the rule of law -in theory . There is unquestionably rampant copyright infringement , fraud, and plagiarism on the internet, especially from non-US rogue sites. Plenty of independent musicians complain about piracy . Google the post, " the Internet: the paradise that should have been" for someone who argues that that a lawless Internet has been a disaster for independent musician.

There has been corporate action vs spam. The gmail , hotmail, and yahoo Emil systems are mostly free of spam , thanks to better filtering.

There is a strong government interest in protecting against IP infringement . In the US A, the government Established IP rights at the very beginning, putting it in the Constitution. ( fwiw, it's also in the UN Declaration of Human Rights). Their decision to emphasize the protection of IP Rights paid off in a flourishing of arts, science and technology in the United States that continues to this day.

I can't see how enforcing copyright law would hurt any author- quite the contrary . Maybe you can elucidate .
We certainly agree that all art deserves legal protection. *As to non- commercial art, I salute them for trying, but I am not under the romantic delusion that the true artist must create only for arts sake and should be unconcerned with " filthy lucre." I think that is bullocks, frankly. Nobody wants to be a starving artist- including. Starving artists. Most artists "WANT to make a living from the art, and are desperately unhappy when they can't . Those who can't make a living from the art don't continue to starve- they stop doing art and move on to another line of work.*

It's important to understand that good art is hard, and that truly great art is HARD. It takes a lot of time, effort, and expense to get good enough to make great art. The play AMADEUS makes Mozart's creation of music seem effortless, but as Malcolm Gladwell points out even Mozart practiced relentlessly for most of his formative years before he became great.

Even good art is generally produced by people who worked long and hard to become good to produce art that people were willing to pay for- in short, by professionals.
Hobbyists tend to create art that at best is just good enough , and frankly most of it isn't even that. We understand that, and praise them for trying, but we wouldn't pay for it, even if offered for sale. *Still, it is protected by copyright. Copyright means, lest we forget, that the artist controls what is to be done with their work, rather than some get-quick-rich operator .If you want to encourage ALL art, you make sure that other people can't rip off artists by copying their work and illegally profiting from it.


Bottom line, if you want a plentiful supply of quality art, science, and technology , you protect intellectual property- and not only by paying lip service to the idea with vague statements that those so called artists who are interested in money maybe should be paid, but by actual enforcement of those rights.
In another arena, the way the federal government ended segregation in the south was by "ending segregation"- by actually enforcing the civil rights laws. *When the pre- *1964 legislation proved inadequate, they passed and enforced new legislation- over the objections of those who worried about the federal government crushing "states rights".

I guess it's time to rally the troops by bringing up that ol' devil DRM. It's irrelevant to the present discussion, unfortunately.
The point is that in the continuing absence of effective copyright protection, there would be a decline in quality professional art offered in ANY format. To put it bluntly, you can't strip DRM from the ebook that doesn't get written or from the movie that doesn't get made.
I might add that DRM is an example of your preferred approach to copyright protection - a private, non-governmental approach to a particular copyright protection problem.
I would argue that as effective, actual rule of law is brought to the Internet, there will be less of a need for these private solutions that often conflict with each other. I frankly would prefer a universal government solution in this area enacted by legislators accountable to me, rather than corporate heads accountable to shareholders.