Piracy - You can't have your cake and eat it

To a fast reader, without visual cues it is a jumbled mess. I gave up after forcing myself to read three sentences.

There's three massive core problems with the current media model:

1) Modern media has failed to adapt. When I reinstalled windows I used a pirated version. The key on the side of my case was awkward to read. Games industry nailed it: look at Steam. 2) Entertainment is a waste of time and people know that - if someone can't download a movie they're not going to run out and buy it. They're going to watch cats fall down on youtube. 3) When companies no longer prioritize their own products people lose respect for them.

This SOPA/PIPA drama is simply making #3 worse

1) laws are made to be challeneged, especially if society does not approve. See alextingle's response.

2) If I make a widget in a widget factory. You can get widgets from me or from Frank down the block. Getting it from Frank is illegal. However to use the widget (that you love) you must stick a pipe in your ass. Frank gives it to you at a bargain price and no pipe in ass requirements. The only way to tell me "its not ok to overcharge me and force me to stick pipes in my ass, even if I love the product" is to buy it from Frank. Otherwise you buy it from me, live with the ass-pipe and pray for change.

I mean, here you are calling people "uninformed" while asserting that the printing press was invented "about 400 years ago", which would be around 1612. In reality Gutenberg's press went into operation around 1450. That's 562 years ago, meaning you're off by more than a century and a half.

You do a bit better with copyright law. The first appearance of law that grants the right to copy to the author was, of course, the Statue of Anne (1709/10, depending on whether you're referring to the Julian calendar that was in effect in England at the time, or the Gregorian calendar which has since become the international standard). Here, you're only off by a century.

Unfortunately for your theory, it's a century in the wrong direction. In reality, there were a solid 260 years between the appearance of the press, and the emergence of individual copyright, and that's not "shortly after" by any definition.

Even if you start the clock in 1493, which is when the publishing business as such really came into its own with Anton Koberger, you're still off by a factor of more than 200 years. So any idea that individual copyright appeared as an immediate and necessary consequence of the press's invention is unsupported by the facts, as is the idea that there's never been a significant amount of time in which one existed without the other.

For the record, the rest of your theory is as sketchy as your grasp of history - especially the bit about protecting "thought and opinion". Those are two things that Copyright absolutely DOES NOT protect. Nor has it ever. So clearly you've still got a lot of work to do, but that's all the time we have today.

Class dismissed.

"At that time (about 400 years ago), there were no "well capitalized industrialists...and the few corporations that existed at all were captives of the sovereign rulers who created them."

Again, not so! Indeed, 400 years ago is when some of the fierest and best capitalized industrialists known to man emerged. Specifically, I'm talking about the Dutch East India Company - a private corporation which commanded a heavily armed fleet several times larger than those of the competing French and British Crowns combined. And it was wind-powered industrialization that supported the assembly-line techniques that made their ship yards so incredibly productive.

Obviously, theirs was a relatively limited enterprise - certainly nothing compared to what we now refer to as the Industrial Revolution. But that difference is a function of having wind rather than coal to run their mills, not the application of the techniques, or the systematic accumulation and pooling of capital needed to apply them. In terms of the capital-intensive industrial operations needed to run them, and a chartered corporation to manage it, the VOC (as it was known) was a force unlike any the world had seen, utterly dominating both the global trade routes to the East Indies, and the flow of commerce moving through their ports. Phillip II of Spain waged a furious fight to maintain his colonies in the Netherlands, but the idea that he did so successfully is the opposite of reality. When the Dutch finally sued for peace, they did so as a republic.

Getting back to the press - while I mentioned that the business aspect of if got off the ground in 1493, Anton Koberger's family didn't continue it when he died. Though it was profitable, it remained baffling to his relatives, who had - and continued - to trade in gold. In terms of the flow of ideas, the most influential presses emerged in Venice. This was a city that had it's own long history with industrialization. Specifically, the Arsenal, which is where it pioneered the heavy industrial techniques needed to build the fleets with which it dominated the Mediterranean throughout the Crusades.

This unmatched foundation in assembly-line work was easily transferred to publishing operations, which the Venetians also turned into an industry. It would be some time before work of equal quality and sophistication was produced North of the Alps. And Venice, of course, was a republic. Kings (and Popes, and Princes) were dominated by the Venetians, not vice versa.

Incidentally, nobody who actually knows what they're talking about refers to Kings as "sovereigns" until after 1648, and the Peace of Westphalia, which is what established the concept of the sovereign state as such; one (theoretically) secure in its borders and (again, theoretically) free from the external authority of the Pope. Ergo, the sovereignty.

Given the general magnitude of your historical ignorance, this must seem like a minor point, but still. I actually do know about this stuff, and hearing references to "sovereigns" operating in the early 17th century is like nails on a chalkboard. It's a bit like hearing people discus life in the "American States" circa 1720.