Jack Simth, sorry for not quoting, but it's too tedious.
For corporate charters, I was thinking of more recent US situations rather than British crown charters. In the 19th century, for example, corporations were formed to establish large companies for things like interstate railroad construction. They had to be approved by government to ensure they were doing something for the common good, and not forming an evil for-greed only monster like we have dominating today's economies. No doubt there was still plenty of corruption, but at least the power was theoretically in the hands of the public to deny the existence of large powerful organizations whose purpose is solely to maximize its own profit margin and power.
You suggested "a significant slip up would cause, not a fine, but a total cease and desist order with frozen assets for five or ten years." for corporations - sounds good to me.
"It isn't always corperations that have problems with others duplicating their work - I have read a fair number of Online rants from independant authors that were having the same problem, especially in cases where an upright character was put in compormising positions."
- You mean, taking someone else's fictional character, and creating fiction about it where it does perverse things or gets killed or whatever? That's an interesting question for society to decide if it wants to legislate against. I'd say it's pretty mean and insensitive to do so, but I'm not sure I'd want a law prohibiting it.
I agree there is an issue with people pretending other people's work is theirs. I just think the patent and copyright laws are unsatisfactory, and are abused by many lawyers and corporations. It's a tough question with a lot of grey areas, it seems to me. In the absence of a fair system, I'd rather freedom prevailed rather than unjust enforcement.
Regarding Alice's comic example, you wrote:
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That only works out so cleanly if the comic is long-term gold, rather than the short-term fad variety that is surprisingly common. For a long-term gold comic, it helps if the image gets out there; for the short-term variety, money needs to be harvested quickly, as there won't be more coming in after a short time. Meanwhile, Bruce's work that increases SEIV's sales is taking money out of Alice's pockets. Shouldn't it be up to Alice to decide which she gambles on?
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It seems to me you are trying to enforce a certain unnatural market situation. It's up to Alice and her publisher to exploit her own commercial success. If Bruce's SE4 mod makes a lot of money for SE4, that's an unrelated market, and a natural success due to SE4's wonderful mod-ability, which it fully deserves, and is a natural product of the gaming market. It would be a real shame to say that generic modable game engines need to be outlawed, in order to protect an unnatural monopoly on the right of private citizens to generate free fan shipsets or mods for a generic game engine!
It's very similar to what Intel, Microsoft, and media megacorps are trying to foist onto the computer and media recorder industries! Humans have developed technology which could allow everyone to quickly and freely share all digital media, but these corporations are trying to criminalize, monitor, and prevent the simple act of copying digital information. Microprocessors that are hard-wired to check every data copy for "digital rights", etc. It's an amazing power grab, but I don't think it can Last forever.
You asked:
"So how do you propose to change human nature away from the herd mentality?"
Through good education that teaches people to think for themselves and question trends rather than follow them.
Individually, by pointing stupid herd behavior out to the more intelligent and receptive members of the species, and resisting stupid herd behavior wherever possible.
You wrote:
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Besides, the United States of America is in the top five nations for per-capita creature comforts for the average person; part of that is due to the corporations' greed: they need to sell stuff better than their competiters, and to do that, they need to: Have a better product, make their advertising more entertaining, or make their product cheaper - any one of which can increase the creature comforts of the population (better product -> easier/faster/more effective -> more comfortable life; more entertaining advertising -> people are more entertained -> slightly better lives; cheaper product -> can spend more recources on other things -> slightly better lives).
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How often are you entertained by American advertizing? How often is it mind-wrenching, moronic, inane, insulting, illiterate, vice-promoting, annoying-as-hell garbage? Hmm, how about software corps like Microslop and Harborg securing monopolies on their markets by tactics such as buying up creative smaller companies and then laying off their staff and making crap Versions of their products? How about McDonald's? How about corporate media? All vile crimes against goodness, if you ask me.
PvK