You trivialize our economic system when you describe it as "only financial." People die over money.

I don't want to defend the actions of the copy-write robber-barons. I do not know what the appropriate response for infringement should be. I ignore violations of my own content. Yet I believe that I have a right to the content that I produce. And I respect the rights of others' content. Do you believe that content producers should not have these rights?

You missed half of my point. It's not only "just financial". It's also "just financial harm only if we are pre-supposing the the rights whose natural existence you're trying to prove in the first place"

I do not argue that the rights are natural. They are a legal and economic construct.

There is nothing natural about them. But that does not mean that these rights do not exist.

The question I ask you is, to whom should these rights belong?

The entity that has labored to produce the content? Or the entity that has obtained a copy of that content?

I'm not sure if we're even talking about the same thing then.

In a previous post you said

>"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?"

Which seemed to me like an argument for an intrinsic, natural right that a content creator should have, irrespective of current law.

So either we are arguing over current law, in which case the questions you ask are already settled by courts and we should be discussing whether current law is acceptable.

Or you are arguing about rights that people ought to have, but then you cannot say

>"But that does not mean that these rights do not exist."

If we are arguing about rights that one ought to have then they do no exist a priori, they have to be constructed first.