How are the people who created Facebook compensated?
I see no reason why ad-based free distribution couldn't be used for e.g. music and movies. People want convenience more than they want free - nobody uses Diaspora, everybody uses Facebook.
Also, there is a lot of money to be earned by selling concerts, cinema performances, memorabilia... (I also wouldn't oppose some reasonably short copyright term, e.g. from a few months to a few years, that would allow authors to more effectively monetize e.g. cinema.)
My problem with that is that we have the internet - a system that lets us, the people who derive benefit from the content to compensate the people who created it directly. You want to add middle men that don't need to be there. When it comes to profiting from other things (performance etc.) you are forcing people to do something they may not want to do. What if I create a great album of music but don't fancy uprooting my life, travelling the world on a tiny budget, and leaving behind my family for 10 months of the year? With the internet I could have charged a fair amount direct to the consumer but you decided information should be free.
You can't have everything be ad-based, in the end someone has to actually sell something to make money that pays for the ads. I always felt that this is a flaw in the ad-based model, you try to compensate for you own product not having any value by pushing other peoples products.
Anyway, if we're purely taking music, downloading it of TPB or listing to it on Spotify more or less makes the artist the same amount of money.
Software and books are different, because you can't really compensate for lose of sales with performances. Movies I'm unsure of, cinema could make the money needed to cover the prodution cost, but I don't know if that's viable.
You can choose not to sell a thing, or you can choose to sell it. You can even offer it via a contract where people are permitted to do some things with it and not others. But what is really poisonous is the government-prohibited-by-default position of copyright, where people who come into possession of e.g. old, out-of-print books are forbidden from copying them even if noone knows who would or could "own the rights".
If you want to keep a work to yourself, trade secret protection is adequate. If you want something that behaves like modern copyright, then you can sell copies of your work with appropriate contracts. But it should be your responsibility to track violators, just like if you sold me some land with a proviso that I had to maintain the orchard on it. Copying should not be guilty-until-proven-innocent the way it currently is.
"Their work" presumes ownership. Information does not have inherent ownership, unlike physical objects which can only be controlled one / a few people at a time.
As owners of creative products, the content producers can do as they feel with them. They can choose which characters die, how the story is told, and how the content is presented. That is because it is "their" work, it is not just information.
Freedom of information is a great concept, and one which I support. Tax payers should be able to find out how much organization x donated to politician y. But a movie, a creative work, is more than information. It is a product, an investment, and requires a substantial effort from many people.
Please let me know if I am misrepresenting your argument, but it seems that you are using this notion of freedom of information to blanket, what I view as, theft. Just because no one was strong armed for a loaf of bread does not mean that a theft did not occur. No one may have been deprived of physical property, but we do not live an entirely physical world. Piracy deprives content creators of opportunity: the opportunity to distribute their products in the way that they see fit. Perhaps this means that they give all of their work away for free through the channels of their choosing. Perhaps they sell it. Perhaps they don't sell it to people who live in certain regions.
As a content creator, shouldn't I have the opportunity to give away my products (or sell them) in a way that I see fit?
>That is because it is "their" work, it is not just information.
How do they own it if they make a copy and hand over that copy in its entirety to someone else? How do they not relinquish control of that copy?
>what I view as, theft
But nobody is deprived of something when it gets copied. You can still modify your original and I can do as I please with mine.
This is how folk tales and our legends and everything propagates through society. Information, including creative work, flows freely.
>As a content creator, shouldn't I have the opportunity to give away my products (or sell them) in a way that I see fit?
Sure, that's at your discretion. But once you have given them away I don't see any natural reason why you should have any influence over what others do with a thing you have given away.
If you are a wood-carver and make an ornamental table for me, should I not be free to chop it up for firewood if I don't like it anymore just because you think it would be a violation of your work?
I see no reason why ad-based free distribution couldn't be used for e.g. music and movies. People want convenience more than they want free - nobody uses Diaspora, everybody uses Facebook.
Also, there is a lot of money to be earned by selling concerts, cinema performances, memorabilia... (I also wouldn't oppose some reasonably short copyright term, e.g. from a few months to a few years, that would allow authors to more effectively monetize e.g. cinema.)