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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannyalcatraz" data-source="post: 5419393" data-attributes="member: 19675">No.  Same rights, same responsibilities.Again, we're not discussing the actions of a company that provides food or shelter, we're discussing the actions of a company that provides an entertainment product: a pure luxury.  Their removal of their own IP from bookshelves has no more moral/ethical weight than the hypothetical removal of marshmallows from the shelves of US grocery stores.  No person can claim a superior right to their IP.The current system does not favor the exceedingly rich: rich or poor, IP holders have the exact same bundle of rights.  What the poor cannot do as easily as the rich can is defend their rights from people who seem to think their desire to own or use IP is more important than the IP owner's right to contol it.A band I represented a little more than a decade ago had the same problem as Metallica: a Russian piracy site selling their stuff.  Metallica had no more rights than my clients, they just had the money to hire a Russian IP attorney to take care of things.  My guys were just blue collar joes who couldn't hire a Russian IP attorney nor send me to Russia to do it myself...and I certainly couldn't afford to do the job pro bono.  My guys never recouped their initial expenditure to record that album; Metallica won in their case.  Not because of having more rights, but by being rich enough to be able to defend themselves.One of the surest ways to make a profit from IP- especially if you are poor- is to sell or license it to a person, company or government that has the bankroll to 1) fully realize it's potential and 2) defend the IP to the fullest extent of the law.Strip away the rights of subsequent purchasers and you devalue the IP itself to virtually nothing.  Nobody will want to buy or license IP that has NO rights attached.  IOW, the end consequence of your position is that the only creators who could make money from IP are the ones who have some kind of money already.  The poor schmoe who, say, has crappy credit and a job at 7-11 but who nonetheless comes up with a viable process to refine gold from dumps at 3¢/ton (while simultaneously sequestering CO2) is NOT going to be able to get a loan to make his $100K prototype to prove his process works.  And with no ability to sell or license his idea, not only is he doomed to become a 7-11 manager after only 25 more years, the world is denied an invention that would definitely make the world a better place.It's much like the sale of land: real estate is not just land, it's a bundle of rights, and they can be sold off or retained piecemeal.  If you lived in Texas, as I do, you would probably be living on a plot of land called a "surface estate"- a pics of land that has no rights to the minerals below.  As such, the land would not be worth as much as an "entire" or "mineral" estate...because if oil or another resource is found below a "surface estate", that surface owner not only doesn't get any money from the mining company, they also have no right to exclude the mining company from reasonable measures to retrieve that resource if the persons owning the mineral rights gives the go-ahead.</blockquote>

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