Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
But you can "profit and profit and profit forever" from the single effort of buying shares in a company. Should we ban the stock market on the grounds that it allows people to profit without doing any work?
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I don't think the concept that causes problems is profiting without doing any work. It's more in the difference between most work and IP creation. If I am a plumber, and install a toilet in your house, should I be paid for the act of installing the toilet, or should I be paid each time you use that toilet? Copyright is more like the latter, currently. A creator is paid not for the initial creation, but each time someone wishes to use that creation in the future.
I'm not saying that isn't fair, I'm just pointing out that it *is* different.
Why is it different? Well, for a long time people have realized that ideas are easy to copy, while physical objects aren't. (Provided you're not from Star Trek, of course...) That made it so that people wanted to keep their ideas secret. If a person came up with a good way for making steel, or violins, or gnocchi, they would only pass it on to people they trusted, late in life (usually an apprentice).
But, if the person with the idea died without passing it on, that idea was lost forever, obviously a bad thing for a society that loved gnocchi. To combat this, people came up with a compromise: in order to get people with ideas to share them with everyone, they would get the sole right to profit from that work for a period of time. Afterwards, of course, it has to go to the public domain, otherwise the point is lost. But for that time period, the creator has a monopoly on the idea.
So really, it's not that the "natural order of things" is that someone should get paid for having an idea, that's a construct put in place in order to encourage growing the field of ideas. It seems to have worked fairly well, too, until an invention that made it even easier to share ephemeral things...