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Declaring that all art should be free is a 60s druggie's crack pipe dream! If that's true, then every farmer should happily give away all his produce, every restaurant should feed all for free and all workers should toil for the love of it. Of course, in some sort of Utopia or heavenly cloud, it would all be thinkable. But not on this practical planet. Even the Bible declares that we should be paid fairly for our labors. The reason musicians and other artists take legal steps to protect their products and want to be paid for them is that they need to earn income to survive in this economically balanced world. Now, if you want to talk about product piracy, just look at our overseas pals. Ever since America led the world into the industrial revolution a century or so ago, many of the rest of the countries have latched on for a free ride as they stole the plans on everything we did here. Early on it was the automobile, then aircraft, then household appliances, then clothing and now all of our advanced electronic products. Just go shopping in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore or Shanghai. Everything you see is a knock-off of a product that was first invented, researched and manufactured in the USA. The student who downloads an illegal piece of music from the internet is doing something illegal, but he's a piker compared to the government-supported industries of copycat nations. They just laugh at our copyright and patent laws, as well as our worker wage protection systems. Worse still, we are the prime retail customers of their cheap imitations of what were once American products made by well-paid Americans.

Learn more about this author, Ted Sherman.
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