Why is it okay for programmers to be turned into lifetime billionaires for what amounts to an interesting hack and a little hustle (e.g. Facebook), but it's not okay for a musician to make a few large off a successful/popular track that entertains millions and millions of people for years?

I find the double standard evident in these discussions to be ludicrous and frankly elitist. "Our unicorns are completely meritocratic, but yours don't deserve it!"

Then there's this sort of sanctimony, which also always pops up in these discussions:

> ... but those who still make art for the sake and appreciation of art itself ...

Translation: artists should be perfectly content to eat dog food when they get old because theirs is a noble altruistic profession ... says the member of a profession whose average college grads can land six figure gigs as early twenty-somethings and have lifetime earning potential beyond the wildest dreams of your average musician or artist.

Oh the horrible greed of these artists! They want me to pay less than what I spend at Starbucks for a week to listen to an album I might enjoy for the rest of my life!

It's easy to preach altruism for other people or praise others for their noble asceticism. Try a little poverty yourself sometime. It's not romantic. It's not noble. It's not virtue. Poverty is humiliation, defeat, suffering, stress, walking around for years with a rotten tooth because you can't afford a dentist, and knowing you will spend your old age with bedsores and cockroaches.

As far as Hollywood's expenses go: do the makers of these indie films have 401k's or retirement benefits? Hollywood employees do, at least most of them. Providing a real career for people is costly, and Hollywood employs millions of people in real jobs with real benefits.

I guarantee that the makers of indie films are doing so to break into the biz, and that they do not have the intent of being poor forever. Look at what the makers of Primer (arguably the best indie sci-fi flick ever) are doing now. Indie films and crowdfunding are awesome, but they don't eliminate the need for copyright or replace the rest of the business model. They just give more options to indie and emerging artists.

... and don't get me started on the biggest losers in a post-copyright world: writers. Musicians can tour and films have theater runs. When was the last time you attended a live reading of a novel by its author? Writing would vanish as a viable profession. No more novels, no more poetry... at least other than amateurish efforts and fanfic. Writing a real novel of any quality takes years.

I don't necessarily support SOPA or some of what's in leaked TPP documents, but I also do not support those who want to strip artists and the art industry of their rights so that their work can be monetized for free by content mills, portals, and advertisers. Hollywood studios and record labels are not altruistic, but neither are big Silicon Valley tech firms.

Google supports a softening of copyright because it serves their interests -- and because they don't need it! They keep their software in 'the cloud' (trade secrets) and make money by providing a service with it (capital ownership). The software biz as a whole could probably survive without copyright for this reason, and because software has inherent service-like characteristics (the need for constant updates, etc.). Movies, music, and books do not have these characteristics.