What if copyright were abolished?

>Copyright enforcement necessarily entails monitoring of all computer communications, and therefore the destruction of online privacy. (The threat of Deep Packet Inspection is not a strawman.)
>Copyright law criminalizes a large percentage of the population. (When everyone is technically a criminal, the government can use selective enforcement to punish its enemies.)
>Copyright law chills academic research. (Copyright is being used to prohibit not only for-profit distribution but also not-for-profit research.)
>Copyright law's reach already extends to many things, and is expanding with no end in sight. (Expansion is perpetual both in scope (originally only maps, charts, and books; now pretty much everything) and in duration (originally 28 years; now 95 years).)
>Copyright law creates a corporate information police, undermining accountability and due process. ($150,000 fine per work infringed; irresponsibly overzealous DMCA notices)
>Copyright law erodes the public domain and free culture. (The fair use exception is worthless.)
>Copyright law poses large economic costs to society. (How much does the entertainment industry spend on bribes to governments?)
>Copyright law prevents the Internet from fulfilling its promise. (Per-copy royalties make no sense when the cost of distribution is almost literally zero.)

questioncopyright.org/what_we_lose_when_we_embrace_copyright

Thoughts?

Other urls found in this thread:

questioncopyright.org/what_we_lose_when_we_embrace_copyright#starving
plagiarismtoday.com/2013/10/07/difference-copyright-infringement-plagiarism/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

>Thoughts

>wah wahh property is bad
no, there's a reason copyright laws exist. tho I agree sometimes they are retarded they are necessary.

You didn't address anything he posted.

I agree with the arguments in the OP.

Is it even possible to remove copyright considering the amount of money it makes?

don't need to, only a communist would think it'd be a good idea.

questioncopyright.org/what_we_lose_when_we_embrace_copyright#starving
>>But how will X make money if copyright is eliminated?
>Copyright is a means to an end, the end being the creation of artistic works. The monopoly given out via a copyright is not an end unto itself--in fact, any monopoly is a nonoptimal and undesirable economic arrangement, all other things being equal. So it is wrong to be primarily concerned about the revenue of people that may have profited under this scheme because their earnings were not the point of the policy of copyright in the first place. There is no Constitutional right to the success of a particular business model.
>So can artists, software engineers, etc. continue to make money without artificial constraints on the distribution of information? Of course they can! In Against Intellectual Monopoly, Boldrin and Levine point out several instances where the absence of copyright has not led to bankruptcy. They give the example of authors in the nineteenth century who demanded an advance from a book publisher in return for a promise of sending the publisher the first finished work, enabling the publisher to get a first-mover advantage that would ensure profits. In modern times, they point to similar arrangements on works that are not copyrighted such as the 9-11 Commission Report that still bring in healthy earnings for publishers (even when the text is freely, legally downloadable from a web site). For breaking news stories, they argue, many often pay to get access to the headlines first, even though the same will eventually be available to the public at a later time. Other examples of industries that became profitable in the absence of copyright include the nineteenth century printed sheet music industry, the early twentieth century movie industry and the modern pornography industry.

>limiting free market
>not communist

Thanks for the spoonfeeding. I understand now, and agree.

I agree that copyrights should be abolished but a lot of people like them for some reason, I would be willing to allow them to stick around if they expired after 24 years and it applied retroactively to all current works older than 24 years.

If we really wanted to keep copyright, it should be limited to one year and fair use right should be greatly expanded.

Whole lot of examples from times before the internet (and easily being able to spread/copy information) was really a thing. Wonder why that is?

>They give the example of authors in the nineteenth century who demanded an advance from a book publisher in return for a promise of sending the publisher the first finished work, enabling the publisher to get a first-mover advantage that would ensure profits.

That would be an example of copyright.

But what even is property? Copyrights are just a privilege granted to you from the government allowing you to monetize ideas as a passive income stream.
The only real justification of copyright is on a utilitarian basis e.g. without being granted monopoly control over new ideas no one will ever invent anything new but that's pure bullshit since that's the whole point of capitalism in the first place... without copyrights you would just need new ways of financing things

If copyright was abolished, I could take all of your ideas, profit from them, and develop them in a direction that makes you feel disgusted but you are unable to do anything about it because people like it better than your own version.

>"free" market

You could make something new out of it? That would suck.

...Was that supposed to be an argument FOR copyright?
>tfw I've read literally tens of millions of words of Harry Potter fanfiction but have read the canon Harry Potter books only once or twice each
>tfw I've read literally tens of millions of words of Naruto fanfiction but haven't even read more than one or two of the canon compilation books
>tfw I've read three book-length Twilight fanfiction stories but have read absolutely zero canon Twilight books

>without copyrights you would just need new ways of financing things
Which don't work. Which is why we have copyright.

say you create something great that people want. You release it to market and start to sell it. A big company sees your product's potential, and decides to sell it themselves, with their overfunded marketing team, giant efficient distribution partners, and capital to offer better service and warranty.

You could try to "compete".
Then you would give up and wish you had never wasted your time creating something useful in the first place, if it only serves to make someone else money.

The other situation depending on the rules would be: anything that is created can be reproduced or copied at will for free by anyone, again removing incentive to create in many cases.

Other thoughts:
copyright doesn't really "make" criminals. It's not that hard to check before using someone else's work inappropriately. Though I do think some ways in which it is applied are against the spirit of the rules. But if you're taking something you didn't create, and marketing it as your own, that's dishonest and unfair.
I would agree that in some cases, copyright law is applied/interpreted unfairly, and I would support changing some of the related rules.
Being against intellectual property rights is nonsensical, and is easy to understand why once you create something you are very proud of and would like to see credit for your work. Also, copyright enforcement does not necessitate widespread spying. Just because the gov't may choose to do this and justify it, does not make it necessary or just. If you have a claim that someone infringed upon your copyright, you present evidence to the court and make your case. Then legal discovery will permit information gathering, there is no need to preemptively spy on everyone to prevent copyright infringement. That's the same garbage-tier argument for spying on everyone to preempt terrorism.

>say you create something great that people want.
Wouldn't that be patent, not copyright?

You're confusing patents with copyright. Patents expire. Unless you're providing warranty on a book? Or a movie?

>Being against intellectual property rights is nonsensical
Did you even read the article?
>Copyright infringement is also unrelated to plagiarism. Plagiarism is the act of passing someone else's work off as one's own; that is, failing to properly attribute the work to the correct creator. Copyright infringement is the act of distributing a work without the copyright holder's permission. To infringe on the copyright for the Beatles' "Hey Jude," I could, for instance, copy the song over a computer network to another location. In contrast, to plagiarize the Beatles' "Hey Jude," I would have to go around attempting to convince others that I actually wrote the song.
>Plainly, misattribution and copyright infringement are different things, but you would not know that from listening to, say, Hilary Rosen of the RIAA. Plagiarism is the cardinal academic and artistic sin, so it is no surprise that the content industry attempts to channel the outrage directed at plagiarizers for their own purposes.

One good example of what happens when copyrights are loosened is comiket in Japan. They have two of them a year and pretty much the main attraction is all the fanworks derived from popular mainstream works. In fact mainstream artists, developers, and writers mostly start out as fans making derivative works which they sell at comiket or similar events.

Woah man that's way to neutral and makes too much sense for a Mongolian basket weaving board.

Which rule would it fall under if you were selling someone else's work without claiming it was your own?
Maybe I have misunderstood.
If copyright law were abolished, would it be legal to pirate software? I'm actually unsure of this now. Is there a distinction between copying/using and distribution for money?

Without copyright there is no "original author" for all intents and purposes. The authorship belongs to anyone who can make a copy.
You only know it was The Beatles who wrote Hey Jude because they had copyright so no one else could slap their name on it. Remove copyright and it's now: "Chevrolet presents Hey Jude."

>It's not that hard to check before using someone else's work inappropriately.
Assuming you're including patents in this, it's objectively false. Patent trolling wouldn't exist.

>Copyright abolished
Corporations would start taking things into their own hands. No, really.

That's just like forking software. The best version survives the marketplace of ideas. The shitty forks don't get users/developers/contributers because they're shitty. You're free to create your own fork at any time and if people think your fork is better they'll jump ship. You don't have to be first, you just have to be better.

There are laws against plagiarism. Plagiarism has nothing to do with copyright, though it's related to trademark.

While I do think it's shitty that you can buy a patent, have no intent to sell the product, and simply use it to sue people with, if you're trying to sell something that is patented to someone else, you're still being unfair imo.
As far as patents vs copyrights, the way i understand it is that a patent is more for an invention, or a way of doing something. and a copyright is for a more specific work, like writing of some sort or art. I'm not sure that I find much difference in my position being that I would like to see both protected to a reasonable extent.

I'm still not sure of the implications of this argument in the OP.
Would this argument propose that pirating software be legal, but selling pirated software be still illegal? Or would neither be legal and I'm not understanding properly?

What really bakes my noodle is how patents are 20 years but copyrights can be like 120 years and counting (we're due for Disney to try and extend it again for Mickey Mouse soon).

That's such a large discrepancy. Disney will keep extending it as long as they can get away with it. Wouldn't surprise me if they just said "Fuck it, copyrights never expire. Now pass my bill."

>copyright
>property
lel

Anything to do with plagiarism only holds due to copyright. The law does not work on fanciful notions of what is "objectively good". If there's no injured party, there is no purpose to the law.

And there are a lot of billion-dollar corporations out there, why haven't any of them tried to keep extending patent protection to like 1000 years?

I think the biggest issue is that the idea of intellectual property isn't something inherent, it's something our culture has been taught over many centuries of precedent.

If America abolished copyright law right now, for the most part people would continue to treat IP the same way they do now.

Similarly, if you implemented America's copyright law into China, they'd still have their culture of stealing ideas. Their shitty counterfeit products would still be a thing.

probably because they benefit more from an invention's patent running out, so they can copy it and sell it themselves. Where as copyrights only benefit them as long as they can hold their own rights.

Plagiarism is fraud. If I steal the manuscript for Harry Potter, pretend that I'm J. K. Rowling, and get a contract from a publisher to write ten books, I'm defrauding the publisher because I'm not actually a good writer.

plagiarismtoday.com/2013/10/07/difference-copyright-infringement-plagiarism/
>While copyright infringement has one victim, the copyright holder(s), plagiarism has two sets of victims, the copyright holder(s) and the people who were lied to about the origin of the work.
So, even without copyright, there's still a victim.

The idea seems to be abolishing copyright altogether, but maintaining things like trademark and attribution. Keeping trademark and attribution can deter fraud.

copyrights create artificial scarcity where none exists and reduce competition

That's the idea, to reduce competition for people selling what is rightfully mine :)

you and everyone else, too.
what's the problem? people already take advantage of someone else's ideas, anyway

>Plagiarism is fraud. If I steal the manuscript for Harry Potter, pretend that I'm J. K. Rowling, and get a contract from a publisher to write ten books, I'm defrauding the publisher because I'm not actually a good writer.
Without copyright you wouldn't get a deal in the first place, since who pays for free content?

Copyright doesn't just protect digital works, it protects all works.
Abolishing copyright wouldn't fix anything. The problem is that the copyright periods are grossly over extended. There's no reason for TV shows/movies to have like 50 year copyright protection when money basically stops being made after 5 years. There's no reason for artworks/literature/etc to have 50 year copyright AFTER THE AUTHOR'S DEATH.

Copyright is necessary for production works to make a profit. Copyright can be used to protect academic research, ensuring that it IS available.

The other problem with copyright is companies that hold copyright. The problem with academic research is often that researchers have to sell out to some corporation to get funding and thus sell the copyright to the corporation, but that's not the only way it can be done. What we need is more public funding for research so that the researchers can retain the copyright, then they can make the research as available as they want.

Copyright is necessary. It's just being abused by corporations.

I mean, I could support reducing copyright law and its reach. But on a basic level, I believe there should be some protections granted to creators. I mean, if microsoft stole and sold an OS i write, just because they put "thanks to user for his great work!" on the product, I'm still mad as hell.

>selling what is rightfully mine

there is nothing that exists that did not build on previous work that you yourself did not invent

there is also no way to prove you did not steal the idea from someone else

imagine a world where Calculus was patented

most art is derivative, copyright does not produce better content is just produces poorer consumers

>In Against Intellectual Monopoly, Boldrin and Levine point out several instances where the absence of copyright has not led to bankruptcy.
Only "several"?

>Copyrights are just a privilege granted to you from the government allowing you to monetize ideas as a passive income stream.
You're thinking of Patents.
That's a completely different kettle of fish. Copyright means you have actually produced something.

>I mean, if microsoft stole and sold an OS i write, just because they put "thanks to user for his great work!" on the product, I'm still mad

copyright laws do not serve justice for all, they serve justice for whoever has the better legal team

we live in world where microsoft could make the case that you stole it from them

Copyright isn't there to try and improve media, it's a protection against something you have produced being replicated and/or redistributed by a third party without your consent.

>say you create something great that people want. You release it to market and start to sell it. A big company sees your product's potential, and decides to sell it themselves, with their overfunded marketing team, giant efficient distribution partners, and capital to offer better service and warranty.
Ya and you have a time window to profit, if you can't in that time then you lost out, when things are reversed engineered they will be produced and sold cheaper, everyone wins in the end

>Then you would give up and wish you had never wasted your time creating something useful in the first place, if it only serves to make someone else money.
Just get the money upfront or don't operate under the illusion your going to be able to indefinitely milk your product beyond the time it takes to reverse engineer

>The other situation depending on the rules would be: anything that is created can be reproduced or copied at will for free by anyone, again removing incentive to create in many cases.
All what the government is doing here is creating artificial scarcity, we can have abundance already but it would require some '''people''' to lose their passive income streams

trademark is the only thing that should exist

then who will china copy?

I'm not saying that works don't build on past knowledge, that's the basis of human progression. However, the few things I have created have definitely not used anything that was copyrighted/patented by anyone else.
The way I understand it is if there is a copyright claim, the court looks into the matter and tries its best to verify the validity of the copyright at that time. And if you copyrighted something that was not fully yours to copyright, the court may discover this and you would lose.

Honestly, I'm not sure if mathematical reasoning can be patented or not. But since no one is selling math, I would think that would preclude anyone from getting prosecuted for performing calculations in any case.

>it's a protection against something you have produced being replicated and/or redistributed by a third party without your consent

copyright is not a metaphysical entity, it is a field of law for securing the finance of whoever can hire intellectual property legal council

This is an argument for you shit taste

you're right about that, but that's not a fault of the copyright law, it's more of an indictment of the legal system.

>Honestly, I'm not sure if mathematical reasoning can be patented or not. But since no one is selling math, I would think that would preclude anyone from getting prosecuted for performing calculations in any case.

this literally happens all the time because of intellectual property law for software patents and DRM, and trivial arguments about protecting artists are enabling this bullshittery

>be pharmaceutical company
>spend hundreds of millions on research, expensive equipment and personnel, paper work to allow animal testing, decades of work
>finally find a drug that relieves the pain of ill people
>jonny chong, who didn't spend a second of his time and money on costly research, is allowed to practice deformulation (easy af) and sell it for 1/100th of the price

same for books, people spend half a decade working on them for some nobody to be able to seize all the rewards? fuck that.

Well of course, but then that's basically how all laws work. It doesn't make copyright any less necessary.

That time window could be extremely short, depending on the product. So you sold 3 copies, then Walmart starts selling your product by the thousands and you never sell another one.
How do you propose to "get the money upfront"? By selling the distribution rights to Walmart first? That, I believe, would require copyright protection in the first place.
It doesn't create scarcity of product, it puts the scarcity of distribution in the hands of the creator, which imo, I should be free to sell my product to as few or as many partners as I wish.

Redhat is doing fine. So are a lot of other open source companies.

those two are inseparable and the first is far more likely to change than the latter


>>spend hundreds of millions on research, expensive equipment and personnel, paper work to allow animal testing, decades of work

S U B S I D I E S

Again though, I would argue against any and all subsidies. What's the incentive to spend?

The main problem with this is that I think pharmaceutical companies should be more strongly government funded and thus less reliant on profit from the medicines to recover their investments.

Considering most governments end up fitting the bill anyway (through public health) it would probably cost them less in the long run if they helped fund the research more and allowed the companies to shit out cheaper drugs.

Redhat is selling support. Can you imagine a desktop OS manufacturer who makes all the money from selling support? No.

>make broken, unusable software
>sell support
I'd rather every company not follow that model.

I disagree that because the system is broken, a just law that gets abused should be abolished to prevent abuse. It should be rewritten to prevent abuse under the corrupt system, or the system should be fixed. Now we both know the system won't be fixed, like you said, but I still think removing just laws is a bad idea.

>The main problem with this is that I think pharmaceutical companies should be more strongly government funded and thus less reliant on profit from the medicines to recover their investments.

THEY ALREADY ARE

the supplies they buy are taxpayer subsidized

the infrastructure they use is taxpayer subsidized

the universities their employees and researchers went to are taxpayer subsidized

when they turn around and fuck the taxpayer in the ass with price jacking it's straight up robbery

>say you create something great that people want. You release it to market and start to sell it. A big company sees your product's potential, and decides to sell it themselves, with their overfunded marketing team, giant efficient distribution partners, and capital to offer better service and warranty.
This already happens. That's why a lot of today's art is pure shit made purely to make money. Also on itunes you can find songs of artists who are already dead. The people who sell it have no relation to the artists whatsoever.

>the way these laws are used will never be just but they are still just laws

What's your point? Their support would be useless without the software they produce. They have direct interest in improving their software to sell more support.
Microsoft and apple wouldn't need copyright either to make money, they could sell hardware and support, but obviously they will try to corner the market with shady shit and start rent seeking as much as possible. Because that makes even more money, money they honestly don't deserve, if it weren't for unfair copyright laws.
The argument that without copyright there's no money to be made is completely wrong.

>Copyright is necessary for production works to make a profit.
There's no reason to believe this, people profiting today from the current system would say that just because they are profiting from it. You could finance things and produce stuff but the way you do it would have to be slightly different. The "issue" is there would be a "free loader" "problem" but that would just mean everyones living standards and access to content would be improving.

The way I see it rich people would end up paying inflated initial costs for goods (rich people already do this to signal their wealth) and then competition comes in and prices are driven down quickly enough.
The only reason you can have such a long time span to profit off ideas today is because government thinks this is necessary to encourage innovation, this might have been true 100 years ago but I don't think it is today with internet spreading information so fast

It's so broken, 90% of all fortune 500 companies are running it. Shut up fucknugget. Copyright sucks.

>extend the lifetime of the owner + 100 years
Thanks, Disney.

You can look forward to Star Wars sequels and repackaged "princess edition" videos for the next century.

Meanwhile, they are scooping up all the IP they can find.

Disney ruins everything it touches.

So do you rather companies make malware and sell it for money, like e.g. Microsoft does?
My point is they can make way more money owing to copyright. You got it right.

I don't think subsidies are the way to go, it would completely politicize biomedical R&D.

Abolishing copyright would just force big pharma to compete with pajeets on a manufacturing basis. That's all. Not being able to subsidize the cost of R&D with the final product can be offset with selling massive volumes of dirt cheap drugs globally.

You can file a "technology patent", but you cannot patent mathematical formulae or business processes.

By that argument, filers should have to prove their "invention" is novel w.r.t. all existing configurations of hardware, since mere sequences of operations, written or otherwise, are not by themselves patentable.

BUT, we've had the xor-cursor guy and other BS, so we can rest assured that nobody in that office of the government is paying any attention.

>Without copyright you wouldn't get a deal in the first place, since who pays for free content?

Tons of people do.

I know this is hard for you to understand, but white people like to pay their money to a content producer, regardless of whether or not they can get the content or product for free; just look at how often people tip.

The profits described here would not be nearly the same. People can make billions of dollars from a movie these days. It's an inflated market propped up by shitty laws

government is awful at deciding what should or shouldn't be funded, they are just politicians not angels, enjoy a bribing fest.

And ISPs can make more money bribing state governments to defend their monopolies and sell 100gb datacaps for 200 bucks.
Those corporations are the real freeloaders. They bribe the government into forcing you to accept their retarded business models, and then suck the money out of you like a parasite.

You are right. However, Even with all of that subsidization, a lot of which I would argue should be stopped, these companies (some of which are straight evil i admit) still spend millions of their own dollars on developing drugs, etc.. so removing their ability to sell their drugs exclusively at least for a while removes all incentive to create them.

I will agree that the price gouging they get away with is sickening. Most other sectors can really only get away with selling something at a fairly reasonable profit margin. Food margins are within a few percent usually. Tech margins are higher, but most things aren't crazy like some of the drugs going for ridiculous prices.

There is one quandry which I don't have the answer to. If you're a drug company developing a treatment for a rare disorder, and you only expect to sell to a few hundred people per year, and it costs you millions to develop the drug, if selling the drug at 10,000 per pill will let you break even after 20 years, is it price gouging to sell the drug at that price? I mean, poor sick people can't afford that, and it seems cold-hearted. Yet who would pour millions into a project for nothing? You could argue philanthropic groups and gov'ts could do such things, and I think that's great. And you can be damn sure if I created a cure for something, I would love to sell it to everyone for pennies and be happy I improved the world. But I don't have millions of dollars to speculatively create drugs, and those who do would surely spend their millions on something else, right?

There nothing wrong with copyright, it's just broken and too long at the moment

Exactly. That's why the vast majority cartoons and movies are made only to make money. Promote some ideas, sell some junk, popularize some shitty singer (who in turn has no voice but is popular because idiots by his/her art on itunes)

>the way painkillers are used can kill people but they are still good if used properly

>will
>can

They made only 350 million on 2 billion in revenue.
Microsoft made 17 billion on 53 billion.

So RedHat is barely staying afloat in a system where people expect to pay for software.
Embrace a system where everything is free and how much do you think they can extract?

Note they don't even publicly release the software in order to make every effort to look like it's proprietary.

>it would completely politicize biomedical R&D.

it already is: against DIYers and the open source community

the FDA is shutting down DIY bio labs without any pretext for anything like public health risks while companies like Monsanto can make all the zombie plants they want

>it costs you millions to develop the drug

THIS IS BECAUSE CEOS ARE PAYING THEMSELVES MILLIONS OFF OF THE SUBSIDIES

Copyright laws are shit, BUT if the owner can hide his invention from normal people to copy (for example a circuit with glue on the components) is totally fine. We don't have to be Stallmanites trying to force everyone into our utopia.

>They made only 350 million on 2 billion in revenue.
>Microsoft made 17 billion on 53 billion.

>oh noo, we have 5% less profit margin than microsoft, quick, start bribing the government and hardware manufacturers to give us a monopoly too and then buttfuck people with it

>Note they don't even publicly release the software in order to make every effort to look like it's proprietary.

It's called centOS, they literally bought it to update it faster than before they owned it.

I agree with the general idea.
I think that competition usually comes in the form of a copyright holder making distribution deals for their product, so that many companies can sell it, and the copyright holder gets paid, either upfront or a % of sales, then the mass production/marketing reduces cost.
Also, I think maybe the key idea in all of this thread is what should and shouldn't be able to be copyrighted or patented. I feel like if I write software to do something, someone else is free to write their own and sell it themselves, but if they just want to copy mine and sell it, they can buy the rights from me or they can fuck off. But there are some things that I think shouldn't be allowed to be copyrighted. Similar to the patent rules, you have to show that your invention is sufficiently new and innovative, and isn't just reapplication of other ideas.
And I also agree that the length of copyrights is far too long.

>THIS combination of 1s and 0s is MINE and nobody else has the right to it!
that's all copyright is

Problem is that donation or funding systems wouldn't work for most artists starting out and even many existing artists.

I think were are all about the same here, we have some things that we buy and other things that we pirate. Some of us more, some of us less.

If everything was legally free to obtain, how much would you spend on donations and funding in comparison to now?

I know that there would be some argument towards artists getting a larger slice of the pie if they get money directly, not having to divide between their label and producer, etc but I just don't see it working. Especially trying to go from the systems we have now into completely abolishing copyright.

If copyright had never been created then we would have created different systems for the production and distribution of content, and the public would familiar with it, it would the they way they expect it to work.

The government shouldn't have a hand in deciding what sort of research is going on, but rather just putting money into the pharmaceutical companies. It could be a claim back system or something where for every $2 they spend on research they get $1 back or whatever.

>this number is illegal to share on a bunch of cables with sand connected to them as decreed by a few million men with guns

Really filtrates my walnuts

>this collection of molecules is mine and nobody else has the right to it!
I'm only trying to sell your kidney.

Oh come on, that's just disingenuous. Of course the CEO's make millions. Their salaries still pale in comparison to total spending/revenue. And if a drug cost 50 million to make, and the CEO made 10 million during that span, they still spent 40 million dollars on actual research, even if they took your socialist view that CEO's should be paid minimally. (You do need someone competent at the top, and to attract the best talent to an important position, you need to offer competitive wages, which is why these guys make so much, because the companies have driven the price up that high for a quality leader. Same reason QB's make all the money.)

>your socialist view

that CEO is SUBSIDISED

Well, I am against subsidies. And honestly, corporate subsidies go to the entire company. How they choose to spend their money is up to them. By these type of arguments, you would think the greedy evil corporations would like to pay the ceo as little as possible to maximize profits right? but they continue to drive up ceo wages because..it makes them more money than having a lesser paid, lesser qualified ceo. If you're literally arguing that ALL of the money these companies spend is from gov't subsidies, I suggest you look at corporate accounting reports and their received subsidies, as I highly doubt the gov't fully funds any one company, which again, I am against in all forms.
So, again, however much the company spent that was not from a subsidy, is still money that they would expect to recoup by selling their product, right?

>I highly doubt the gov't fully funds any one company

I don't work in pharma, but I have worked in medical tech that uses pharma, and I can tell you there are thousands of companies almost completely funded by government subsidies and legislation