>>26
It's true that a lot of jobs aren't influenced as much by IP laws (civil engineers, symphonic musicians, portrait painters, etc), but aren't they somewhat irrelevant to the discussion of IP laws? In most cases their business model could not carried over to IP-heavy industries where the development cost to labor & materials cost ratio is different.
For example, for movies the money that is used to pay for actors, equipment, sets, special effects, etc comes from ticket and DVD sales. Obviously theaters will buy knock-off reels without copyright laws, so what is the alternative? Or is not being able to see the movie at all "more free" than being able to see it but not copy it?
Take 3D software; where would the money come from to develop a product like Maya? Sure there's Blender; that was developed as proprietary software (funded by IP laws) too! If movies are copyrighted, companies like Pixar have in-house 3D packages, but like hell they will share it with anybody, IP laws or not.
AutoCAD? Would companies like Arup make software in house? Would access to the actual computers be restricted (maybe by running on a server)?
iPods, computers, cellphones, etc - You couldn't use companies like Foxconn, they'd just copy it! Would any engineering be done in the US anymore? Why invest in engineering when it doesn't give you an advantage over competitors?
Copyrights don't prevent others from creating original work independently, just from copying the competing product directly. So having a copyrighted work isn't really any worse than having no work at all because you can just ignore it.
Patents (especially trivial software patents) are another issue, although considering that they only last twenty years hopefully the most annoying ones will expire (and with more prior art new dumb ones might be harder to find).