> You aren't entitled to anything anyone creates.

I don't think that's always true even now, but it certainly shouldn't be. When something becomes of a part of our culture, and our history, it belongs to all of us. No one is entitled to anything someone else creates until it is shared. Once it is, ownership is also somewhat shared.

If someone wants to write a song and have total control over it they just need to keep it to themselves because once I hear it, I naturally have a right to hum that tune to myself for the rest of the day, or to sing it at the top of my lungs. If someone wants total control over a story they write they should keep it to themselves because once I hear or read it, it's my natural right to be allowed to remember it, think about it, talk about it with others, and retell it in my own words. Before copyright this was the norm. Stories and songs were written and sung, others heard them, repeated what they remembered, added in their own changes and continued to share. If someone designed an illustration, or a bridge, or a garment, once others saw it, they could study it and incorporate those designs into their own works freely. Improving and modifying those designs however they liked.

Telling people that they are forbidden from saying, writing, or re-telling certain things to anyone is a massive imposition on our freedoms. We created copyright knowing it would be a special exception to the norm. It gave special rights and privileges to content creators which would allow them to circumvent our rights and limit what we can say or write or share for a limited time, and in exchange for the brief imposition on our freedoms to reward and encourage creators, copyrighted works were supposed to enter the public domain and after that everyone could freely access and use them.

It's wasn't even a terrible idea, but it's been perverted and corrupted into something that does more harm than good to creativity and progress. Now copyright lasts forever, and if somehow after centuries a copyright does manage to lapse, DRM can still keep those works from ever reaching the public. The copyright on most of what we think of as media doesn't even protect creators at this point, just the corporations who purchased the copyrights from the creative minds responsible for the work. Basically, the contract between creators and the public good has been completely broken. Th media industry paid to have and keep the power of law on their side, but in terms of "entitlement" and morality, they lost the high ground ages ago.

> If someone wants to write a song and have total control over it they just need to keep it to themselves because once I hear it, I naturally have a right to hum that tune to myself for the rest of the day, or to sing it at the top of my lungs. If someone wants total control over a story they write they should keep it to themselves because once I hear or read it, it's my natural right to be allowed to remember it, think about it, talk about it with others, and retell it in my own words.

This seems like an intentionally obtuse interpretation of what I'm saying. No one is saying you can't hum a song but you certainly aren't entitled to a lossless download of that song.

> . No one is saying you can't hum a song but you certainly aren't entitled to a lossless download of that song.

The media industry says that you cannot. Doing so can have severe penalties under the law. They wrote those laws. Hum just a few of the wrong notes in a song you're writing and you can be sued for millions. Create a base line too similar to one you've heard in another song and they'll see you in court. Hum a few bars of something on your youtube channel and Content-ID will cause you to lose your income and put your ability to participate on one of the largest global platforms at risk, not because YouTube cares, but because if they aren't hyper-aggressive about enforcing the copyrights of others the media industry will take YouTube to court. We're at the point now where creating an original work in the same _genre_ as someone can open you up to costly court battles (https://www.techdirt.com/2013/08/20/tale-two-hit-songs-inspi...).

It was increases in the accessibility of printing and literacy which caused copyright law to be created. Although we've moved from printing presses and dictation to lossless downloads today it doesn't change the underlying struggle of balancing the freedoms of the average person, the need to support and encourage creators, the harm to progress and creativity caused by limiting the public's access to content, and the desires of certain people to act as gatekeepers for power and profit.

Once you start talking about who is "entitled" to what it's critical to keep in mind what copyright was created to accomplish and what it has actually become.

Most of those examples you describe are frivolous lawsuits and would fall under Fair Use. Humming a sound on your Youtube channel for example. This highlights a different problem, the fact these large companies can essentially bully you for no reason and unless you are willing to have an expensive legal battle you have no real recourse.

You can say those cases are frivolous, but it hasn't stopped Robin Thicke from being ordered to pay out millions. Fair use doesn't always prevail in court or even within youtube when it should.

There is a chilling effect on creativity when this happens. There will be fewer people willing to risk a massive financial burden by creating something independently if sounding too similar to something else could get you sued into bankruptcy by a group that already has essentially endless wealth.

Currently, the industry doesn't even want the burden of dealing with the court system. They put pressure on youtube under threat of legal action to act on their behalf for free. It's the same with ISPs. The DMCA gave ISPs legal immunity from acts of copyright infringement committed by their subscribers, but only under very specific and poorly defined circumstances.

Right now, they are fighting in courts against half a dozen different ISPs to try to define that wording so that they can make unsubstantiated accusations against internet users and if an ISP doesn't cut the accused individual off from their service forever, the ISP can be sued for billions. No court case or evidence proving that the subscriber has done anything will be needed. If they say someone did it often enough, their service has to be cut off forever. Because some users don't have many options for internet access getting permanently kicked off an ISP can mean getting cut off from the internet entirely, but court cases are time consuming for the media industry so they are willing to let that happen if it means they can make your ISP into their free copyright police. So far, in the courts the media industry is winning.

> aren't entitled to a lossless download of that song

Why not? It wasn't a problem to copy and distribute non-commercially just in my lifetime. Surely society as a whole was not robbed of one of its social and cultural rights to satisfy the greed of some special interests who want nothing more than to co-opt our own traditions and force us to pay rent on them?

The US was built on "piracy" as a copyright-free zone against their then enemy, Great Britain. Ships carried copies of books that sometimes were reprinted and distributed before they were available at large to their own markets because of the efficiency of US enterprise. Russia declares the same, and we get laws drafted in under a week.

Instead of more of these frivolous shakedowns and penny-wringers against the public, the laws we really need written should govern who inherits their senators when a billionaire dies.

Let me flip the question, as the creator of a song, why am I obligated to provide you a lossless download of it?

There are so many local and indie artists who are willing to give you their work for free and would be thrilled to see you copying it to your friends. Those are the people who care about the free flow of information the most. They're also usually the ones who respect the intentions of creators the most. Because if you won't agree to pay money for it and be forbidden from copying, then the smart thing to do isn't to pull out bittorrent. The smart thing to do instead, is pull out your guitar and start recording something better. That's what freedom is. Maybe if everyone wasn't so focused on pirating Goliath, more people would be supporting David.

I agree, the best thing we can do is to try to create new works outside of the current media industry/copyright system. It's increasingly dangerous to do that however. Part of the reason copyright law is so aggressively enforced and expanded is to make it more risky for people to create and publish their own works.

While I fully agree, we should try to support independent creators when possible, but even then people are still left with nothing but terrible choices. Should they cut themselves off from fantastic pieces of art and massive parts of their culture? Should they financially support the broken system and greedy industry holding art, culture, and progress hostage? Should they risk increasingly severe legal penalties for accessing content without authorization?

I think ultimately the answer is going to be a combination of everything. Right now, the media industry has the lawmakers working exclusively for them. Until we can get representatives who'll represent us we'll likely have to resort to increasingly creating, sharing, and consuming art outside of copyright law.