Yes, people often overlook this, and it's evidence of just how absurd our copyright regime is. While big utility, resource, transportation, and retail companies

Yes, people often overlook this, and it's evidence of just how absurd our copyright regime is. While big utility, resource, transportation, and retail companies may not have the best PR, it makes sense that they would be among the biggest operations in the world because they do things that are intricate, complicated, and irreducible. Every day they get the oil out of some hole in the arctic and into my local gas pumps, or they get a consumer good designed and built overseas onto a shelf in my local supermarket or shopping mall, etc. These processes require precision, careful cost analysis, and ultimately employ 10s of thousands of people, all in the process of providing basic living essentials like food, transport, energy, medicine, etc. What do Disney (#52 Fortune 500) or Time Warner (#95 Fortune 500) do that warrants their presence alongside the Pfizers (provides medication; #54) and 3Ms (provides all kinds of materials and plastics; #94) of the world? They throw mud at the wall until it sticks and then just rehash, rehash, rehash. It is far more profitable than any natural business, meaning a business that exist due to real market forces instead of artificially-imposed monopolies (without copyright, there is virtually unlimited supply to "content", making the market infertile at best). We have given away the farm to content owners. Copyright must be substantially weakened. Content is only so grotesquely profitable because we threaten to imprison those persons who copy things without the consent of their local MegaCorp; that is, such transactions occur within a completely artificial marketplace. We need to fix this.