But your analogy is flawed. When a line cook makes a meal, there is a physical good that can only be consumed once. What we are discussing here is whether the line cook should be paid for the recipe, any time anyone uses it, rather than just for the service of preparing the food.
Your assumption is that producing a recipe is easier than producing food. It's not.
Writing a novel is incredibly difficult. It often takes years of absolutely thankless work. Your friends and family think you've gone mad, or you're just wasting your time tooling away on "that book." (Eye roll.)
Music is the same: hard work, endless practice, stop energy. "When are you going to quit that band and get a real job?"
Culture is not free. It's created by the blood, sweat, and tears of people who are willing to stand up against their own doubts and the subtile discouragement of others to channel some intensely personal muse, refine the signal in thousands of hours of dull practice and repetitive revision, and finally deliver something that we can enjoy.
But hey, we're all entitled to their works for free because we're the all-important consumer!
The "information should be free" ideology elevates the passive consumer above the active producer both morally and economically. The consumer has all the freedom and all the benefit for none of the work. Once I saw the injustice in this, I could not un-see it.
Fundamentally I think it's a half-baked ideology that comes from people who are looking only at the Internet in isolation from the rest of the socioeconomic system. Most of these people are well-intentioned, but the ideology fails.
It might work if we lived in a post-scarcity society where income wasn't strictly necessary since the marginal cost of everything is approaching zero. But we're nowhere even close to that.
Your post, whether you realize it or not, assumes that the labor theory of value is true.
The difficulty of producing the first copy is of almost no significance economically, in comparison to the marginal cost to produce one more copy than already exists.
The recipe may be difficult to create, but it is dead simple to copy. The song is difficult to compose, but easier to perform, easier still to play a recorded performance, and easiest of all to copy a recording. The book is hard to write, but easier to read, and easiest to copy.
We are not entitled to any work for free. But we have a reasonable economic expectation that what we pay to enjoy it will be close to what it costs to create an additional copy. If we elect to pay more, it will be because we wish to encourage the artist to create more works at a reasonable cost. Whether you believe that the artist is entitled to more, or not, depends in large part on whether you believe that culture should be an oligopoly good, or a commoditized good.
