If you steal a car, you're depriving someone of a car. You're not taking $(labor + materials).

LOL, where did I say "steal the car?" The cost of duplicating an existing car includes cost of raw materials, machinery and labor. And I just want to pay for that only, not the other design and other IP costs, or marketing/advertising.

Raw material cost: paid
Machinery rent cost: paid
Labor cost: paid
IP cost: not paid
Marketing/Advertising/Branding: not paid

Because stealing IP is not stealing and is okay, according to many on slashdot, not paying for car IP should not be considered stealing.

If the value of a car to its makers were merely equivalent to labor + materials, the maker wouldn't have bothered making the car in the first place.

Right, and you think song makers should bother creating new music if you're just going pay them $10 and distribute it to millions for free?

If you want to have a consistent theory of property rights then intellectual monopoly has no place in it.

I'm sorry, did you or your ancestors create the song? No? Then what gives you the right to take it without permission, to enjoy the fruits of another person's labor? None, you have to right. The issue here is ownership, not monopoly. The person who created the song owns it. The person who did not create the song (eg: you) does not own it and has no rights to it unless he/she pays for it.

If it costs you millions of dollars to make something that I can do for $10 and customers determine they would rather have my product then you should lose business because you are wasting resources.

What exactly can you do with $10? Write a complete song? You're full of it.

A car and a lunch both require labor and resources that cannot be used on another car or lunch.

Fine. But suppose I were to pay for the resources and labor required to manufacture the car, can I have at just for that price (labor + materials)? The same goes for lunch at a restaurant.

If I were to pay labor + materials for both the lunch and the car, the price would be 1/5th to 1/10th the usual retail price. Please find me a place where I can buy lunch at 1/5th usual price or a new car at 1/5th retail price. Bet you can't find such a place. And yet you want to apply the same model to pure digital goods.

but it's abhorrent for the artist to ask people to pay a nominal fee for a copy of the music he/she has worked on?

Yeah, um, that's utterly absurd.

No, it's not absurd. It's the only way these former napster, current torrent users, which slashdot is full of, get to listen to your music for free. It's all about stealing control of music from its creators so the freeloaders don't have to pay that 99 cents to listen to their favorite song. Music will be freed from the tyranny of its creators. LOL.

So how exactly is your argument rational? Do you think paying $10 for piece of plastic for material that cost millions of dollars to create gives you complete rights over that material, including redistribution? In what world can you rationally obtain a millions of dollars worth asset for $10? Perhaps only in the world of pirates, nowhere else.

Whether you derive a benefit from something has no logical bearing on whether or not you should compensate someone for it.

Not even if the benefit is being sold? By your logic, why should I pay for that new car, I should be able to obtain it for free. I should also be able to watch a movie in a theater for free, take a train ride for free, have free lunch at a restaurant. How dare these goods/service providers demand payment for their wares? It's nonsense.

Not at all. I pay money hand-over-fist to see bands live.

Other than seeing band members in person, and I imagine that's fun once or twice, and lively social ambiance, what's the point of concerts? The music is so loud, you have to wear earplugs or you go deaf after a few concerts. The song rendition is not as good as on the recorded CD, and the singer is usually hoarse or singing off-key. On top of that, the tickets are quite expensive, Seems like concerts are very good at many things, except the music.

just that copying someone's music for personal use is clearly not hurting that, but helping, as without hearing the music first I wouldn't go see a band live. An album is the perfect advertisement for the live gig.

5000 people came to a concert show but 10 million people listened to the song on their smartphone or hi-fi system for free. Do you think it's fair that 9.99 million people pay $0 for this music?

One of the main reason for organizing concerts is increasing visibility of the band. That is, concerts are about advertising and marketing... the band's CD/single and also the band's image/brand. So if they don't have much future profit coming from sales of their music, there's not going to be any concert to go to. Without music sales, concerts die too, in most cases.

Paying only for concerts is like downloading MS-Windows 10/XP for free, but occasionally buying t-shirts and coffee mugs with some logo to financially support Microsoft. IOW, it's stupid because the income from t-shirts and mugs is going to be 1/millionth less than selling the OS itself.

Why should content creators be ensured a profit? Nobody else is.

If you work for a living, your

salary - expenses - taxes = profit

Everybody works for a profit (except the hand-to-mouth poor people).

Make music of sufficient quality and originality and you will profit from it, copyright or no.

No copyright, no profit. Nobody pays for free stuff. Google, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, pays nothing to use the free operating, Linux. Do you think a common man with limited salary is going to pay for a song if he doesn't have to? You're either naive or delusional.

It's not my job to make sure that you can earn money.

Who said it is? No one put a gun to your head to force you to listen to that song. You listened to it because you enjoyed it, and should therefore pay for it.

If you require laws to be able to do that then you are suddenly restricting my freedom to do the same.

LOL, what false freedom are you complaining about? The freedom to use someone else's commercial work for your benefit/enjoyment without benefiting the owner of the work?

Why should I provide a rational argument against unnatural laws when you won't provide rational arguments for them?

Because you have no rational argument that allows you free access to someone's life's work without payment.

If I went out and painted a line on the road and tried to charge a fee from everyone who passed over it then people would think that I am a loon.

LOL, isn't that called paying for parking or a toll fee?

I own my car you own yours.

That's a simplistic view. Can you duplicate the car without getting sued by the car manufacturer? No, you can't. The raw materials required to manufacture the car only cost (roughly) 1/10th the price you paid to buy it new. That is, the physical objects you so dearly say hold no contradictions, cost only a small fraction of the car (just as the 50 cent plastic CD for a $10 music album). The remaining 90% goes towards paying for car exterior design, interior design, safety testing/design, performance testing/design, worker salaries, factories, manufacturer profits, dealer profits etc. So most of your car payment goes towards paying for IP, the thing you hate so much being charged for.

Do I own my hard drive? No because there are billions of patterns I am not allowed to arrange it in.

A hard disk is a container, just like a bag or a purse. Just because you buy a bag does not mean you own any item as soon as you place it in the bag. You also have to pay for the item before you place it in your bag. Similarly, placing a song (item) in your hard disk (bag) without payment is illegal.

No because there are billions of patterns I am not allowed to arrange it in.

You're free to arrange the billions of patterns as you see fit, and as long as you created those patterns yourself. But if those patterns cost tens of millions of $$$ and resources to create, you're going to have to pay a fraction of creation price to cover the cost of production.

Stop locking content behind paywalls. If your content is good, people will gladly pay you for it.

You mean the donation or panhandler model... good luck with that. Many people want stuff for free, so the producer gets nothing. Besides, the seller should set the price, not the buyer.

IP is a prison, not a marketplace.

IP ensures profit-protection for content creators... it ensures there are dire consequences for people to use the content without payment. The only people who call IP a prison are freeloaders and pirates.

I shouldn't be REQUIRED to part with money to listen to music. We have the technology available that allows anyone to download any song they want for free

What if it's cheap to copy? Didn't it cost time, effort and money to create the song the first place? It takes almost a decade of training, and the person must be talented. You are paying for the benefit of listening to music, the cost to deliver the goods to you is only marginally important. If a song benefits 1 million listeners, the listeners need to pay, it's that simple.

By your argument almost all goods and services should be free. For example, once 100,000 people have bought train tickets they have paid off the cost of the train. Should the train ride be free or 1/10th cost for train riders after that? No. That's how most business models work: huge upfront investment and they break even after a few year of sales. After that it's pure profit. The same model applies for music, as well.

Or rich people who can afford the luxury and enjoy a comfortable, quiet and extremely fast car? Unless they plan to sell their sports car every three years, the cost is only 5 or 7 times the cost of a cheap compact... so not very expensive to them.

Swiss watches are luxury items and there is so much variety. How exactly is the iWatch going to replace all the wonderful watch designs with their plain rounded-corner rectangle design? The Swatch guy is full of it.

All works should be free as in beer, and revenue should come from live performances and donations. Let the public decide what they want to hear and how.

Why should they be free as in beer? Will spending 99cents or $10/month bankrupt any consumer? Why should you get to use someone's work without payment? Let's hear some rational arguments.

Maybe they can "steal," or more accurately, derive their song from others, in which case, they owe royalties of 10%-30% of sales to the original song owner. I've noticed a lot of uncreative rap musicians directly copying tunes from music from other countries and just adding boring rap lyrics and bass on top of that. Maybe they should get sued next.