"Intellectual Property Rights"

Let me just state emphatically upfront that I don't believe in intellectual property rights - at least most of the time.

The record companies got Napster shut down and now are entangled with Grokster.com, a company that gives away peer-to-peer file sharing software. Thankfully, it looks like the record companies are going to lose, as they should.

Sticking to the subject of music, I never understood the concept of music as intellectual property. They sell you a cd or a song, and then they want to regulate what you do with it. It sounds more like renting than buying. Are we really dealing with "intellectual property rights" or "the rights of record companies to maintain a profitable business"? If the record companies want to control the content they sell, then they should develop new technologies that will allow them to do so. (The IPOD is such an example, although its popularity won't last long at 99 cents a song.)

Where there is a stupid concept, such as "intellectual property rights", there is sure to be stupid, if not comical, reasoning.

A lot of people have said to me, including a close family member, that file sharing is "illegal", and that seemingly determines their entire stance on the issue. I laugh at that, because last I checked, breaking the speed limit was illegal too. At least no one has ever been killed as a result of "illegal" file sharing.

Without intellectual property rights, no one will produce content - another laugher. How many dvd's did Shakespeare sell? Who produced Mozart? Was it Geffen Records? Or Jay-Z?

All of this illegal downloading will cause artists to starve !!!!!!!!! I thought "starving artist" was a redundancy even before music went MP3.

The internet is disruptive technology. It has destroyed, created, or transformed almost every industry in the economy. Why should pop singers be insulated? If they need to make more money, then maybe they should do something radical - like go on tour.