Question for TA: If intellectual property rights had not been explicitly enshrined in the Constitution, do you think the United States, at either the federal or state level, would still have drafted laws to protect them? Why or why not?
For the record, this is not an attempt to rhetorically trap anybody or anything. I am honestly curious as to 1) why somebody who did not consider copyright infringement morally equivalent to stealing would support IP rights at all, and 2) if they in fact do not support IP rights, what their justification/alternative might be.
My stance is simple and not at all based on the letter of the law: I support DRM because I think copyright infringement is, on a moral level, stealing. Someone put the sweat of his brow into the creation of something that we all agree belongs to them in some way, and the infringer comes and takes it without permission or actual (though perhaps imagined) entitlement. My mentioning of any letter of the law at all has only been to call attention to the spirit of our cultural prohibition on stealing, and to draw moral parallels. You all may disagree, but I have yet to see an argument as to why, and I find it telling that whenever someone who is pro-Copyright draws that simple moral parallel, the response is inevitably technical hair-splitting between "theft" and "infringement", which is ultimately a questionable distinction since both are quite illegal anyway.
(bonus fun fact, appropos of nothing: Anglo-American Common Law does not include IP infringement under the definition of theft because the British Parliament passed statutory protection of Copyrights about 20 years after the invention of the printing press. No judge ever said IP infringement was theft because there was never any need for them to.)