Actually, the bits are owned by the public, and the public, in turn, grants control over the access rights to them to these big greedy companies. Information that is known to the public belongs to the public (that's us, btw), copyright is our way of thanking the creators/discoverers of the information for their work. The fact that the public is choosing more and more often to withdraw those (intentionally temporary) rights is evidence, not of a lawless public, but of illegitimate laws that fail to represent the will of the people. In fact, part of the process of obtaining a copyright is to place a copy of the work into a public trust, in order to ensure that people are able to freely exercise their natural right to make copies of it after their voluntary period of abstinence is over.

We own the bits, we buy the plastic, and we loan out the right to put the bits on plastic.

I have read your comments, considered your arguments, and changed my mind. The theory that we all consume more potential energy than we need and that some of us excrete the unused portion while others retain it as fat makes sense to me. I still think it likely that some people, for various reasons, have stronger drives to consume calories than others, but now I will take potential differences in digestive systems into account whenever I consider the issue of weight modulation.

People seldom admit it, but they do listen to what you have to say and it does affect their judgment.

Oh, I prefer not to pay for the content at all. I mean, I make charitable donations to open-source software projects sometimes, but I feel no obligation to pay for anything that is made public.

Look at it this way: someone goes to the park and drops something on the ground. I walk by later and decide to pick it up. If it's valuable (like "content") then I keep it, if it isn't (like annoying advertising) then I put it in the trash. In both cases the original possessor of the object relinquished control as soon as they dropped it, and in both cases my reaction to it was perfectly reasonable and responsible. The way I see it, people who patronize businesses that display annoying advertising are subsidizing the pollution of what was once a much more attractive and useful resource, so I encourage everyone to obtain and install ad blockers.

As for advertisers and content providers: the world is changing fast and you will have to work hard and be creative in order to keep up with it. It seems very likely that online content will become available more and more through subscription based aggregation services that will pay for a portion of content creation. Advertising is slowly becoming more targeted,less intrusive and more effective. I am eagerly awaiting the day when I turn off my ad blocker because it is filtering out opportunities that are interesting and valuable to me. Perhaps someday I will actually pay for access to the portion of the data contained in today's ads that is actually of interest to me.

Hey, that gives me an idea: if people won't learn unless they're stung then sting them. Don't just make it illegal to send spam, make it illegal to respond to it. Then law enforcement could send a ticket instead of just a "stern letter". I think that would pretty well destroy the spam business model.