You would pay for direct benefit, but do not want to pay when it indirectly benefits you.

According to what you wrote, you would prefer that no space program got off the ground.

Or, you assert that enough monied altruists would have donated to accomplish the same feat. Either is preposterous.
But then you say you would give voluntarily. Do you see direct benefit?

Ah, it boils down to the libertarian view. Even if you see the value, you do not want to force other people to act in their own self interest.
Next time, just say "libertarian" and save us the time. Your argument is based on dogma, not logic, and you will gain no converts by arguing based on logic. Stick to dogma.

Firefighting isn’t profitable. Police services aren’t profitable. Parks and playgrounds aren’t profitable.

Plowing the streets and sidewalks isn’t profitable. Public art isn’t profitable. Keeping the air and water clean aren’t profitable. Teaching children isn’t profitable. Maintaining our highways isn’t profitable.

Yet we spend our money on these things. Why?

Would you volunteer to pay for fighting fires in a neighborhood on the other side of your town? Or how about to pay for a highway that connects two cities you’ve never been to? Or to educate someone else’s children?

People are selfish, obviously including you.

We don’t want to pay for things that don’t obviously benefit us. But we still want to live in a world where we have things like clean water, educated children, and people to put out our burning homes. Paying for scientific research is the same thing. We have governnments that tax us so that they can provide exactly those services that nobody is willing to voluntarily pay for.

If you want to live without them, why not try moving to Sudan or tribal Pakistan? Try living without the modern society you’re accustomed to if you really don’t want to pay for it. Give it all up. When you have, maybe then you can come back and tell us about how everything should be paid for on a strictly voluntary basis.

The market exists because most people don't realise what they're being sold until it bites them and that's the problem. They've changed the game without changing the advertising and they need to be more transparent to customers as to what they are offering. They won't do this though because they know people wouldn't buy then.

Buy has historically meant buy to keep. The buttons on sites peddling a lot of DRM content say buy, not rent, yet really it's a rental. That's the problem.

Fair enough, i can agree with this. But the copies of the content other people produce are different story.

Do you ever sing happy birthday to your kids? In a McDonalds maybe? Well what you did was create a public performance of a copyrighted song. How dare you. The original owner of the song didn't give you permission to do that.

What about singing this most famous song in a movie? Well that will cost you $10000

How about a band taking a 10 second snip of a symphonic rendition of a rock song and using it as a riff in their own song? Sorry 100% of all income and royalties now go to the original creator of the song, not even the people who originally performed the symphonic piece.

This is the sad reality of copyright law today. I don't have the rights to other's content, but they sure as heck shouldn't have the rights they do either. Don't argue that this doesn't affect culture either.

> You make it sound as if I have a right to the content other people produce.

Yeah, you do, we all do, once a work is performed/released it is in the public domain, that is what the term _means_ "in the domain of the public"

Copyright is an abrogation of that basic right in limited circumstance and for limited time because the _default_ is and will always be public domain.

The purpose of Copyright is to make sure that works are produced because it recognizes the value they provide to our culture. Those works contribute to and inform our culture, they become a part of it much like we do. Copyright is nothing more than a tool to further the _base_ function of enriching our culture. The relationship between the work and or culture _is_ the most important part otherwise Copyright wouldn't exist.

It's _all_ about culture.

You make it sound as if I have a right to the content other people produce.

I have the right to control what my computer does. I have the right to do math. I have the right to copy memory locations to disk. I have the right to communicate.

No, I don't have the right to what other people produce. But if you tell me something, I have the right to write that down. And I have the right to tell that information to other people.

If the content producer hasn't given you permission to consume their content, then you have no right to seek it elsewhere.

On the contrary, they have no right to stop me from seeking it elsewhere. They may have the legal ability, because they've bought protection from a corrupt government, but that's a far cry from a right. When I send a file to a friend, that's a private communication between consenting individuals. No third party has the right to interfere in that.

I don't consider respecting other peoples' rights to be very onerous

Great. Now convince the rest of the world to respect my right to communicate information.

"You make it sound as if I have a right to the content other people produce. I don't and never did. I don't consider it to be "culture" either."

No, but you should have a right to play content you've paid for on a device of your choosing without artificial restrictions.

Which is really the problem. If the content creators can choose what you play content you've paid for on, especially from the web, then they can arbitrarily prevent it working on your old device, and force you to buy a new device when there's nothing wrong with your old one. They can work with companies like Microsoft to ensure it only works on Microsoft devices for example and kill viewing of content on iOS and Android dead in the water.

You seem to think it's just about viewing content illegally, it's not. It's about having control of content you have obtained legally and not allowing content to be used as a tool to be used by vendors in other markets such as hardware to gain advantages through artificial incompatibility and planned obsolescence.

If content producers want us to rent content only then they need to lower their prices to reflect that and make it clear. Right now they want to pretend you're purchasing content to keep whilst only giving you rental rights. This is unacceptable.

The dream of content companies is that they can use DRM to force you to rebuy content every single time you buy a new device. They view this as a way of increasing profits without doing any additional work by profiting off the same thing over and over. They're trying to turn a purchased product into a throwaway consumable that you have to replace with each device using artificial means without dropping the price to match. That is not acceptable.

The internet and digital revolution has made content far cheaper to reproduce and deliver so in a healthy natural market the price for consumers should come down. Content producers want to use DRM to subvert that and instead make the cost of content in the digital age go up by making you buy it over and over if you want to keep watching it. This is their ultimate dream and their preferred goal with DRM as it allows massive company growth for zero effort if it's ever achieved.