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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

When exactly did the record labels ask for a bail out? They complain about people taking their products for free, which is a totally legitimate thing to complain about. If people were getting into ISWY's systems and putting their databases on the Internet for free access, bypassing the revenue-generating ad mechanisms, those companies would be complaining too about it too.

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while I think you probably have a point when you describe unauthorized copying of music as "taking [music businesses'] products for free," I also think it's hard to describe the mechanism of copyright (a government-granted monopoly on your goods) as something completely unlike a bailout. At least it seems a lot like a subsidy.

A copyright is a property right on an original creation. It's a government granted monopoly, but so is any other kind of property right. If you're a golf course, you rely on a government granted monopoly on land, which isn't even your original creation. If you're ISWY, you rely on a government-granted monopoly that keeps a competitor from simply breaking into your servers and copying your content.

There's nothing entitled about expecting the government to keep people from taking things from you. There is nothing obsolete about business models that rely on the government protecting you from that kind of violation.

Property "rights" only make sense if you believe might makes right. The golf course person has the papers that entitle them to the land only because of a series of violent military actions that simply claimed it, and then sold it to the highest bidder. At best it is stolen property on which some sort of statute of limitations has expired.

I mean, the freaking word "title" is right in the middle of "entitlement" for crying out loud. You can argue property law is the best of a set of bad options, but it is far from just, and it is absolutely, literally, about entitlement.

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