Steve Miller's rant was only yesterday. The harder we let corporations ossify the notion that all knowledge should be owned and paid for every time it is used, the more we will suffer.
Finally, you can't steal what is given away free. It's time for a paradigm shift, humanity. Slay this dragon.
For a photographer to take an amazing photo of Zion National Park, they have travel, equipment, and time expenses. In this case, how does the photographer get compensated for all of this if some celeb or background site takes the photo and writes on it: "My home on the range."
The huge back-end that is required to make something is the unseen portion of the economy, there should be a rights warehouse making it easy to put things on and declare usage fees.
*Edit: their to there, because I is grammatically correct.
The photographer would need to be be compensated for their time and effort beforehand, if at all, but the age when one can expect to be paid for content or knowledge seems to be rapidly coming to an end. "Freebooting" is only a problem because we've tried to make ownership and copyright work in a medium that renders them irrelevant, but really it's just the web working as intended.
Like a lot of people here, I benefit personally from being able to assert ownership over digital content, but I can also see the writing on the wall.
"..we are now seeing the effects of free and immediate duplication of a product. And, sadly, we have been caught with our pants down."