[snogglethorpe]

> The author contributed the tune, It's a cheesy tune, but it's clearly enormously popular. You're basically arguing that if enough people like something they should just get it for free.

I'm saying that the reason why it's popular doesn't obviously have much to with the tune itself. Popularity is often pretty arbitrary.

This sort of intellectual property law is intended to (1) provide incentive for people to put the work into being creative, because that benefits society, and (2) satisfy intuitive notions of fairness (if somebody puts a great deal of effort into something, people feel that he "deserves" some reward from that).

For trivial works, neither (1) nor (2) is really justified: There's no significant effort to reward, society does not benefit significantly from it (because in such cases popularity does not stem from the work itself, any other work would have served just as well), and intuitive notions of fairness do not tend to consider great reward from little effort as justified.