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Originally Posted by Good Old Neon
My (admittedly snarky) point was, wouldn’t it be great if we all lived in a world in which we all shared our skills freely, with little or no need for personal monetary reward.
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yeah, but that's just silly.
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Unfortunately, reality tells us otherwise – and to a large extent, artists, like the rest of us, need and appreciate being paid for their services.
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I think that is focusing on the wrong thing. I would bet that a lot of people who engage in "piracy" (Arrr!) do it because of problems with the middlemen (RIAA, Publishers, etc), not because they have any desire to keep the artists from being paid. I think both consumers and artists are suffering under the current model. Unfortunately, the ones with the most power and money (middlemen), are the ones that don't want the current model to change.
I've seen very few people actually argue that artists should not be paid, and more often than not it isn't the individual artist who is arguing for stronger and more draconian copyright laws, but that's where the focus in these arguments usually ends up. The problem I see is that the middlemen are taking advantage of both sides. They're the ones that are clinging to old business models and keeping prices high, as well as using the inflated threat of "piracy" to push for stronger anti-consumer laws (DMCA, copyright extensions, etc). They've managed to screw over both consumers and artists, while turning the argument into consumers vs artists, all the while sitting back and taking money from both ends.