A hypothetical situation that relies on my understanding of copyright law and those who are against it:
At some point in the future, a food company breeds a new variety of fish. This fish is fast-growing, easy to care for, and most importantly of all is tasty and nutritious. This effort takes years and quite a lot of money.
Shortly after the fish is announced and the fish farms are set up, a rival company manages to steal a few breeding pairs and breed his own fish, who breed more fish, etc. Those are given to other companies, who breed and pass them on, etc. Now pretty much everyone has a fish of their own and the original company made zero profit off of the time and money spent.
Now, fish aren't digital downloads or whatever, but is it really so bad for an artist to ask for appreciation and compensation for his/her/their work? Yes, a number of products have been successful despite being free, but I'm fairly certain that they are the exception, not the rule, and either the makers of those products have to pursue a career (thus lowering productivity) or they subsist on donations like Toady.
Like I implied at the beginning, copyright law is not my strongpoint.
In that case, the other company in question stole the fish outright. Similarly, I wouldn't be in favour of breaking into stores and stealing hard copies of Diablo III, either.
A more apt analogy would be the one company developing the wonderfish, followed by the other company observing them and trying to figure out how to make them themselves (Which could take a while). For a while, the developers have a clear-cut advantage, but eventually other companies start to make the same fish.
Patents and copyright still don't make much sense. Yes, an innovating company loses its monopoly once another company figures out how to do what they do cheaper and/or with higher quality. That's how the market works. Such companies still have the massive advantage of starting off with the new product, and it will doubtless take time for others to get around to copying them and improving on things, meaning they still get rewarded for innovation.
Meanwhile, with patents and copyright, you create minefields that no one wants to navigate without a small army of lawyers since they might accidentally infringe on someone else's obscure work and get sued to all hell or they might put all their effort into inventing something only to get one-upped by a "submarine patent" and have to pay someone who did jack all for "permission" to use their "idea".
As for Paul:
What else could 'private property rights on the internet' possible mean? It's a euphemism for copyright law. You don't own a car on the internet. You don't own land on the internet. Unless he's talking about swords in your MMO, which I highly doubt, he is talking specifically about copyright laws.
Paypal, Bitcoin, buying stuff from Amazon (which, might I mention, moved states due to taxes), etc etc etc
It's worth mentioning that whenever Ron Paul talks about "protecting private property", he generally means that in the context of "against the government". I haven't seen many cases of him standing up for copyright on any occasion.
Hell, just the sheer fact that he does not rail against the dangers of the overly strict copyright law shows he is for it; you can't simply ignore something of that magnitude in a document about internet "freedom" unless you are actively supporting it!
Now that isn't playing fair. Yeah, he doesn't regularly rail against copyright. He's busy railing against the Fed, foreign wars, the drug wars, taxes, gun laws, etc etc etc. Its worth noting that other progressive "ideal" types like Al Gore, Bernie Sanders, Dennis Kucinich, Obama himself (though I honestly see him more as a fascist), and so on basically never rail against copyright, but I don't see you accusing them of being lackeys for corporations on the issue of copyright.
