>Here is the thing, someone has gone ahead and spent time and effort to create and sell something,
That's a capital investment. Putting resources into a designing and manufacturing a product before you've got anything to sell is a risky proposition, but it's how the vast majority of all economic activity takes place. Investors bear the risk that people won't be willing to pay for the finished product, and understand that there's a chance that they will lose money instead of making it.
Simply putting effort into creating and selling something doesn't entitle you to a positive return; you have to make something that customers are willing to buy, and people who make their own copies of intangible, non-rival goods are just another category of people who aren't willing to pay. Indeed, in practical terms, they're the last segment of your potential market you'd want to pursue; much better to focus on people who aren't buying your product for other reasons entirely.
> someone then has gone on out of their way and attempted to steal it.
But no one is stealing the work that was created. "Stealing" implies depriving someone of something they own, but this is impossible with respect to creative work. No one can remove the pattern of ideas that defines the work from the creator's mind.
What's happening here is that people are making their own replicas of the creator's original work. This isn't "stealing" anymore than someone is stealing your house by building their own house using a design based on yours.
Making a copy doesn't deprive the original author of anything; all it does is alter the external market conditions under which that author might seek to obtain revenue from selling copies of that original work. But he never had any right to a positive market return in the first place; his profit is inherently contingent on the willingness of others to pay him, and people who aren't willing to pay him because they made their own copies of the work are no different than people who aren't willing to pay him for any other reason, unless you assume that he already had the exclusive right to make those copies.
Do you see the paradox here? You can only posit that the creator has an inherent right to restrict others' copying if you assume that he has an inherent right to a positive ROI when marketing the work, but you can only assume an right to a positive ROI in a scenario where people making their own copies is already legally censured, because otherwise, there's no legal distinction between people who didn't pay him because they copied the work, and people who didn't pay him because they just didn't want the work at all.
And that's the mental gymnastic that lets people steal all sorts of intellectual property - they rationalize it, pretend it isn't somebody's property and livelihood, and take it mostly because they just want it and its hard to secure so it ok, right?
If I'm not willing to pay him, then he's not owed anything. Hey! I'm not willing to pay for lots of things; now I can just take them. Thanks, Gormo! I'm free of social responsibility!
The only mental gymnastic present here is your repeated attempt to create some kind of equivalence between intangible concepts and physical objects by using words like "property" and "stealing". In reality, the concept of property only has meaning with respect to rival goods, and it's impossible to "steal" conceptual content from people without performing lobotomies on them.
Your property rights extend to allowing you to assert exclusive physical ownership over the items that you have created or acquired through voluntary trade. Note that the concept of voluntary trade implies that making a living by taking advantage of speculative commercial opportunities is necessarily excluded from the scope of your rights: your ability to make a profit through trade is definitionally contingent on other people's willingness to do business with you. The commercial viability of your work is necessarily other people's "property".
When the work you're doing produces physical goods that you intend for sale, the distinction between your property rights in the goods themselves and your access to the commercial opportunities present for selling those goods may be blurred, since both are invoked via the physical object itself. But the distinction is still present: no one is obligated to purchase your widgets, but neither may anyone deprive you of those widgets without your consent.
But in the realm of pure ideas, which are intangible and non-rival, the distinction is much clearer: it's physically impossible for someone to steal your ideas. The best they can do is make their own separate copies of those ideas; they can't deprive you the product of your work itself. By making their own copies, all they're depriving you of is the opportunity to sell the idea to them. But, as we saw above, that opportunity was never yours in the first place; it was always contingent on their consent rather than yours.
Attempting to use positive law to create artificial "property rights" in purely conceptual "goods" is akin to a farmer lobbying for laws which punish people for keeping their own vegetable gardens. You're attempting to re-engineer the circumstances of other people's lives in order to force them to be your customers. The reality is that "intellectual property" policies violates other people's real rights in order to mitigate the risks of speculators, so I think it's safe to say that by advocating such a policy, you've already abandoned any pretense of "social responsibility".
That's a capital investment. Putting resources into a designing and manufacturing a product before you've got anything to sell is a risky proposition, but it's how the vast majority of all economic activity takes place. Investors bear the risk that people won't be willing to pay for the finished product, and understand that there's a chance that they will lose money instead of making it.
Simply putting effort into creating and selling something doesn't entitle you to a positive return; you have to make something that customers are willing to buy, and people who make their own copies of intangible, non-rival goods are just another category of people who aren't willing to pay. Indeed, in practical terms, they're the last segment of your potential market you'd want to pursue; much better to focus on people who aren't buying your product for other reasons entirely.
> someone then has gone on out of their way and attempted to steal it.
But no one is stealing the work that was created. "Stealing" implies depriving someone of something they own, but this is impossible with respect to creative work. No one can remove the pattern of ideas that defines the work from the creator's mind.
What's happening here is that people are making their own replicas of the creator's original work. This isn't "stealing" anymore than someone is stealing your house by building their own house using a design based on yours.
Making a copy doesn't deprive the original author of anything; all it does is alter the external market conditions under which that author might seek to obtain revenue from selling copies of that original work. But he never had any right to a positive market return in the first place; his profit is inherently contingent on the willingness of others to pay him, and people who aren't willing to pay him because they made their own copies of the work are no different than people who aren't willing to pay him for any other reason, unless you assume that he already had the exclusive right to make those copies.
Do you see the paradox here? You can only posit that the creator has an inherent right to restrict others' copying if you assume that he has an inherent right to a positive ROI when marketing the work, but you can only assume an right to a positive ROI in a scenario where people making their own copies is already legally censured, because otherwise, there's no legal distinction between people who didn't pay him because they copied the work, and people who didn't pay him because they just didn't want the work at all.