Whose property is it anyway?

The US Congress has decided to postpone any voting on 2 bills, SOPA and PIPA, which would have punished internet sites for piracy. It is only right that authors, musicians and cinema producers should be paid for their work on which they have spent enormous labor and lots of money. However, how do you decide piracy? We have all grown up sharing comics and story books as children so that if a child bought one book it could be read by the entire class of 40 children and then got passed down to younger siblings who shared it with their friends. Surely this is piracy but how do you stop it? It would be ridiculous going around punishing school children or their parents for an innocent act of sharing with friends. The music industry is partly responsible for its troubles. In the past you had to buy a CD of an artist at enormous price to listen to just one popular song while not liking any of the others. In the days of vinyl records one could by a 78 which provided just one song and was much cheaper than an LP but then you would have to keep on changing records as each song finished. CDs and LPs gave no choice so when Apple launched its music service where you could download each song for 99 cents it became enormously profitable. However, intellectual property does not involve just entertainment. Western companies are notorious for trying to patent natural products such as turmeric, neem and basmati. In a race with Craig Venter the Human Genome Project just managed to decipher the genetic code of humans first and put it online for free. Surely each human owns his own genome and no one has the right to patent it. In 2007 3M, a US company bought the rights to BacLite, which was developed by Porton Group with Ploughshares Innovations Ltd, a subsidiary of the UK defence department. BacLite was a cheap, easy and fast way to diagnose the deadly MRSA but 3M shut it down. In November last year the High Court in London supported 3M's defence that it was not commercially viable. Whatever the legal minutiae this case shows that a large multinational with huge coffers can buy up intellectual property and kill it to increase profits whatever the harm to the community. China is the world's largest center for fake products and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Finally, it is really annoying that politicians are so concerned about music and movies while there is no control of the intellectual property of making nuclear weapons. Writers, musicians and movie makers should be paid for what they produce, even if it is Harry Potter, but bandits of intellectual property must also be controlled. Thing is, western countries are used to robbing and will find it hard to stop.