Using your same logic, we should just help ourselves to food in stores, since it's just a recomposition of dirt and organic stuff that's been around since the dawn of man.
I just am puzzled why so many people don't see the "value" of intellectual property....
That said, I don't care if "big music" dies. I can make in my little bedroom studio music that's just as "good" as anything you can buy at the store for $17. The prices are far far far too inflated, and "music superstars" should be a fading breed....
As many anti-IP people will tell you, if you take the food from a store, you are depriving the owner of that food and they cannot sell it to anyone else. That form of stealing is significantly different than the form of stealing that goes on when you copy a book, movie, or song. Most people intuitively realize this -- even those who believe in protecting works of authorshiop.
I just am puzzled why so many people don't see the "value" of intellectual property....
I most certainly do. I think it is very important that artists get compensated for their labors. Even handsomely so. But I don't think that compensation should last forever. It doesn't for any other labor.
Let's look at your food store example. When you buy an apple, you are compensating the farmer (and all of those along the distribution chain) for their labor and resources. But once that farmer grows that apple, if he wants to make more money next year, he needs to maintain his trees and grow more apples. And more apples the next year. And so on. Now let's compare that with a songwriter.
The songwriter spends time writing a song. And they should certainly get compensated for that effort. But once they've written that song, they can make copies of it with trivial effort. So with perpetual (or near perpetual) copyrights, an author performs labor once and then simply collects money for that labor forever. What would it mean to farming if farmers could hit it big on one harvest and then retire? Or automakers could hit it big on one car and then retire?