Guy colored in someone else's photo for profit. And doesn't kick any of it back. I also don't suppose his estate lets anyone else sell copies of that image. Seems like having your cake and eating it.
Theft is the act of taking something from someone, if you copy something you by definition have not taken it, you copied it.
The original is still there, intact.
Taxation is closer to theft than copyright infringement is.
They may have the legal authority to control it, and may have the legal authority to use government guns to prevent unauthorized copying, but they do not have the moral or ethical right.
You must reject natural rights in favor of "who ever have the most guns has the right" method to definition of rights
Theft is a morally defensible issue because it deprives another.
Copyright is morally indefensible: There is no deprivation. It is only about controlling others.
Is copyright still doing that, or is it creating cartels, being used to tell you what you can see and hear, encouraging patenting obvious things for a "landgrab", and supporting companies who don't really add anything to society other than file lawsuits when they think they can get a payout?
For some industries that need a lot of upfront R&D and investment and can be well articulated, copyright/intellectual property should be able to be used to protect that investment, but we went very wrong with the current maximalism with copyright terms being 100+ years for songs that might take less than 1 hour to make, and where things like business processes and "X but with a computer" can get patented.
While U.S. copyright is established by the Constitution, does this mean it's in the same category as "inalienable"? Something worthy of more research on my end to be sure.
Something doesn't sit right with me when the same legal system supports these two different scenarios:
1) I find land or buy land and occupy it indefinitely as my property with exclusive use rights
2) I create something new using my creativity and have little to no rights over its exclusive or non-exclusive use
Why would I not control something I create when practically most other ownership rights are based on a first-come-first-served basis? Clearly if I created something, I came to it first.
The concept of Inalienable or natural rights stems from the Philosophy of Self Ownership
If you deny the existence or objectivity of natural rights, then you also deny the concept of "self" and that humans are self aware actors that objectively own their own bodies.
that is a very dangerous thing to deny