Sharing is living a descent life! Good members of a community share. Bad
members don't.
As for "paying for something that only some people would use", this is called
solidarity. It is the way any tax works: you pay taxes for public schools
even if you do not have children, you pay taxes for hospitals even if you are
not sick, you pay taxes for public libraries even if you never enter one,
etc.
This last example actually is interesting because it directly relates to our
discussion. The public money that ends up in libraries can be said to be not
properly spent because libraries largely are outdated. It would be cheaper
and far more efficient to distribute the books over the Internet: no limit on
the number of readers of a book, hence no need to pay for several physical
copies, no need to have a physical location, a staff to administrate or clean
it, no working hours, no need for the reader to spend time in transportation
to go to the library, etc. And if libraries would do that (so that anybody
can enjoy culture), why would that be restricted to literature? And why
couldn't the people help the libraries and do the same? That basically is
what we propose: a *legalization* of non-commercial sharing (against a tax if
necessary).
Notice that, instead, we have laws that prohibits sharing + laws that makes
us pay tax (on disks and so on) because people share anyway. In some sense,
the law punishes twice people that respect it: they pay the tax even if they
do not enjoy sharing.
