Copyrights are often compared to property rights, especially by those who are opposed to the practice of file sharing, which often includes the illegal exchange of copyrighted material over a
peer-to-peer file-sharing network. Those who want to increase the power of copyright owners stress the laws' similarities, while those who want to decrease the importance of intellectual property,
resist the analogy.
The scarcity argument claims that when a resource is overused, its value is diminished. This is true with respect to land, where communal land inevitably
becomes over-grazed and over-farmed, but not true when it comes to copyrighted material. An idea or work suffers no harm from over-use or over-distribution; in other words, it's not an exhaustible
resource.
The reward argument claims that people must be able to keep the goods they produce or they will under-produce. This argument does apply to copyright law; after all,
what's the incentive for an artist to produce if someone can just come along and reproduce the same thing. Copyright law shouldn't be universally applied to all categories of creative works. For
example, would there be a shortage of photographs if no copy protection for photographers existed? Would there be a shortage of music? No, which is why the law needs to be reexamined.
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