yeah, there's been a huge shift from everybody being a producer to most just consuming art. The minority that still produce probably understand what a loss this is better than most.

what if you wanted to listen to mozart himself or have an original renoir? my point is you couldn't buy a copy

Then you were a snob and you deserved the markup. Just as today if you want your coffee beans personally picked by Howard Schultz it'll cost you more than most people think of as "a reasonable price for coffee".

ok let me rephrase: even if you wanted to buy a reasonable copy of a renoir, the price you paid corresponded to man-hours of labour. It was a compensation for something.

That's why there are so many parallelisms to Gutenberg's revolutionary invention and the modern age, for instance:

http://www.amazon.com/Piracy-Intellectual-Property-Gutenberg...

> what if you wanted to listen to mozart himself or have an original renoir?

Then you did as you have to do today - you went to the source.

Thanks to amplification, more people can hear Bruce Springsteen live than could hear Mozart.

> my point is you couldn't buy a copy

That's true, but that's not your original claim or the claim above.

Your original claim was that you had to pay. That claim was wrong.