> Why should our tax dollars fund that legal framework? What's in it for the rest of us?

Isn't it contradictory to want to copy what a content creator produces and then deny that the content itself has value?

Which is it, does the thing have value that makes others want to copy it so it's worth respecting that content as property of the creator, or is it valueless and there's no need to copy it in the first place?

You can't really have it both ways. If the content is worth copying then it obviously has value so it's worth it for society to protect that value. Not protecting that value means dis-incentivizing content creators.

What is that value? Well, like with everything else, that's a negotiation between the buyer and the seller. For mass-market products, that means that the seller sets a price and the buyer makes a purchase or no-purchase decision based upon the price and the perceived value of the thing being purchased.

Once again, we're talking mostly about entertainment content here.

In weighing the societal benefit of the content creator vs the pirate who wants to have a system that would deprive that content creator of any means of earning money from his work -- guess to which party society will probably always attach more value.

So as a person who funds creation of content that I enjoy, I have to ask you: Why should my tax dollars fund your legal framework?

A good idea is worthless if nobody ever thinks it, and it's value to society increases as it is shared with more people. This is completely opposite from the economics of scarce goods: once a good idea has been discovered, the macroeconomic optimum strategy is to eliminate as much as possible barriers to spreading that idea, so that everyone can benefit. Hoarding information may let you increase the price, but it doesn't increase or protect the value. "price=value" isn't a definition; it is only true for scarce goods in a competitive market. Would the Pythagorean Theorem be more valuable if you had to pay a fee to use it?

And no, we're not just talking about entertainment here. It's impossible to objectively separate entertainment content from more "important" ideas like Uncle Tom's Cabin or even geostationary orbits (popularized by a sci-fi author). It's also impossible to fully separate copyrights and patents, since they have the same legal foundation and purpose.

I would agree that a good idea has more value across the society if it's shared. So that's one part of the equation.

What about the other parts? Why would you want to kill the incentive for working on good ideas by preventing their creators from having control over them for a time after they create them? The capitalist system has shown over and over that financial incentives drive progress more quickly and more surely than any other system ever devised by any society on earth. Content creation isn't magically different.

Further, why would you so callously wrest away control of someone's labor? That person who created that thing has a meritorious right to benefit from that labor. To ignore that person's right to the benefits of his labor is to enslave him in a society of forced egalitarianism. It's basically, morally wrong, and it always seems to go hand-in-hand with ruthlessly authoritarian communist regimes... and there are reasons for that.

I'm not advocating the complete repeal of copyright and patent law. I actually think that the constitutional provision for such laws is exactly right. What I'm trying to point out is that copyright and patent rights are not the natural order of things, and that without specific enactment, it is not the default state of the law, and that exclusive control over ideas is not something that authors and inventors should take for granted.

Any useful copyright system must be a balance of competing interests, and it is not in any way tyrannical to suggest that the authors should not win by default and then go on to use public resources to enforce their own rules for how their ideas can be applied or disseminated.

Imagine a world in which Harlan Ellison wins every lawsuit he files. That would be horrible.

Ideas are inert. What is called "control over ideas and labor" is really control over other people who wish to use and build on them, and that is at best a necessary evil we should minimize.

Ideas are fairly different than books, or movies, or Emacs, or MacOS X, though, aren't they?

Not really. I'm using "ideas" here as a substitute for the term "intellectual property", which includes copyrights and patents. The term encompasses a range of abstractness, but how abstract an idea is doesn't change the fundamental lack of natural scarcity or the property of having more value when more widely disseminated.

Serious answer: "a good idea" is something you can describe in a paragraph, or a few pages. A book is something that takes months or years to write, and may well be something read for pleasure, and thus does not have many positive externalities as per your comment above. IP is something you've got to be specific about: software patents are different from biotech patents which are different from copyrights on various things, which are all different from trademarks (which no one seems to complain about all that much).

Snarky answer, which I feel somewhat guilty about including, but I liked it too much to erase it: if you can't spot the difference between an idea and a book, perhaps exposure to more of both would be beneficial to you.

No hard feelings, I guess I owe you a beer.

The conciseness with which an idea can be expressed is in no way related to the amount of work that went in to developing the idea, or the potential value of the idea to society.

FYI, trademark law is not based on the same constitutional foundation as copyright and patent law, and serves a different purpose, and is typically dealt with much more pragmatically than copyright and patent issues, so it's seldom relevant to the same discussions.