It is less about greed and more about control. Property, imaginary or not, we all want to collect and control it all. When it is our creation we get very protective, hypocritically protective, when it is not our creation we loosen the rules so we can gain a tighter grip.
I am curious about your parking meter analogy. What are parking meters for? You will generally only see them in areas with a limited amount of parking, where parking is scarce and therefore much more valuable. Does the city put meters in place to capitalize on this situation or to regulate the situation? If there were no parking meters in place then all those spots in front of the smoothie joint may have been occupied by squatters who grabbed a good spot and are holding on to it. But because the city charges a relatively high minutely rate for the spots have high turn over. A quarter would have been worth your trouble had the alternative for free parking meant you had to walk a few blocks. I am not sure how parking is "imaginary property", I can touch the parking spot, hell even taste if I wanted. The city rents that spot out with a parking meter. Now if the parking meters where in place purely for revenue, then they would run 24/7, most parking meters have an enforcement time on them, generally during busy periods; only the most extremely trafficked spots have 24/7 metering. When you parked for free you used that parking space and no one else could. Did you deny the city revenue? Perhaps, someone else may have paid for that spot, but if there were other spots open around it probably not. You did not seem to violate the spirit of the parking meter which is in place to regulate the best use of the parking spot.
Intellectual property law is in place to promote the release of intellectual creations, the state grants a limited monopoly to the creator to reward them for releasing the creation. Problems arise in two ways: when creation ceases because the incentive is not large enough to create and alternatively when the spread of creative works is inhibited by the monopoly which is intended solely to promote the distribution not gain the creator profit. The term starving artist is a testament to amount of motivation that is needed to promote creation, along with the argument that truly greatest intellectual creations will come out of necessity and/or love for the art. On the other hand distribution of intellectual property is being crippled by the "property" owners, wide spread access, which is the ultimate goal, is being unnecessarily restricted and opposing the spirit of intellectual property law.
Value is found in scarcity, copyright creates an artificial scarcity. Your parking space analogy falls short when we cannot replicate parking spaces at little cost. That simple parking space on the side of the road could be expanded with parking garages and what not, but it comes at a material and an even greater spatial expense. The replication, distribution, and storage of movies, television, software, and books is astoundingly cheap these days and has decreased the value of such commodities to near nothing.
The most interesting area of intellectual property is in pharmaceuticals. Something like the cure to a disease seems near priceless until it is discovered, then it is only as expensive as replicating it once the formula is known. Yet the expense in researching the drug or vaccine may have been very high. If we attempt to distribute the cost of the research across the sale of the cure then there may be some who are denied access. This is easily resolved with up front funding. Those who find the cure valuable will raise money for its research and fund the research. The research only has investors interested in the end cure not the monetary gain from the cure. The same approach should be taken towards all intellectual property. If you enjoy an artist and wish to promote more creation from that artist, then fund the artist. Eventually we will see more movements like kickstarter.com for the creative arts. An established artist can go on there and say: "Hey you liked our first album, if we raise $500K we will create another!" An up and coming artist will say: "Here is a sample track of what I am capable of...if I raise $50K I will put out an album!" The money can be held in escrow and once the artist makes good the money is released to them. The more the artist makes good on their offers for new creative works the more fans will be willing to front them money.
We have not seen the fashion industry, where no intellectual property rights exist, collapse. Instead we still see people paying obscene amounts for a label, and really branding is the only intellectual property that is truly important; because branding benefits the consumer. Branding lets the consumer know that the product is from the creator they assume it is from. Consumers seem to live and die by branding, whether it is Apple or Nike or Lady Gaga, it is an image and a "quality" expectation. Credit where credit is due is the most important trend across all intellectual property creation from the name of a band to the author and contributors to a journal article.
Honestly I would rather most movies not be made. Did I really need Spiderman 3 the movie or Lost the television show? Heck no, they were disappointing, but I watched them so I could be in the loop with my social circles and my late night television jokes. I need to be cultured, for the same reason I read the classics. I did not enter into any contract with the creators of Spiderman 3 that I would pay for that junk, but I am not going to suffer to a greater extend by being socially ostracized for not having seen it (thank God for VLC and 1.5x speed viewing), and I am surely not going to promote the additional creation of such garbage by paying for it...but that is my own personal hypocritical justification perhaps...
