[ProPain]

Shabba, well worded, I totally agree with your points.

For me the piracy/stealing/local laws debate isn't that relevant. If you look past that all the main question is: Should you be able to charge for your intellectual works.

The pharmaceutical industry is an interesting example because developing a new medicine usually costs tens of millions of dollars. Essentially a medicine is nothing more than a chemical formula and obviously a chemical formula can be copied without cost. So following Socra's reasoning it should be free to do so.

It's clear that the people copying the formula can make the medicine for a fraction of the cost, they don't need to regain the development cost. A model like this would quickly kill development.