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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannyalcatraz" data-source="post: 5891528" data-attributes="member: 19675">Even old-school economists would also count the cost of the time you spent searching, downloading, etc., plus the prorated cost of the ISP and your data storage devices occupied by the pilfered data as well, at the very least.Modern economists recognize that information itself is valuable, even if it is never rendered into tangible form, and their arguments have been codified into law...which made the rise of companies like Microsoft and Facebook possible.  Modern economics recognizes that creation of intangible property requires just as much an investment in effort, time and knowledge as tangible property, and that society is better off if people are able to recover value for their efforts.And this is not exactly new, "modern" is a fairly wobbly word in this context.  This theory actually arose out of the very old idea that information is valuable if it can be rendered into tangible form.  That is why before copyright, trademark and patent law, trade groups and governments jealously guarded recipes for kinds of steel, for instance, or kinds of gunpowder! Sometimes with the threat of death.  Later, following similar logic, companies protected recipes for drugs, chicken or beverages, but only with the force of monetary penalties and jail time.Essentially, what IP law does is incentivize investment in IP by protecting a creator's ability to recoup his investment.An illustration: a fan once criticized Sergio Aragones for charging a fan $50 for an autographed sketch that took him seconds to create.  Sergio's response was that the fan was not paying the $50 for just the quickly drawn sketch, but for all of the years and years  of practice it took him to be able to render that sketch so quickly.</blockquote>

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