Copyright holders and Intellectual property

This is a quick point, separate from my last post, about Copyright holders.

I just want to raise the point that intellectual property seems to me to be a very different issue to copyright. The company that owns copyright eg Warner Bros on Harry Potter (HP)/ Buffy (BtVS)/Babylon 5 (B5) are often not the same people/person who came up with intellectual property (JK Rowling/Joss Whedon/ J M Stracinzki (JMS)).

There is some anarchist idea in there about the need to put food on the table or as the protestant work ethic teaches us: 'earn a living' vs the desire for profit. I intend, among many things, to be a creative producer but the aim is to put food on the table and allow my husband, future offspring, friends and I to live well. The profit issue is a little alien to me - what do you need all of that money for anyway, I ask? (Ok so we'd buy other fandom related goods - do *not* ask about our comic/game/dvd/video/cd collection)

So creative producers are signing over their intellectual profit to the megabucks of the world so that they can put food on the table. I think this issue actually is part of the reason that fans produce at the quantities they do (I'd probably put in 10-20hr/week into fan-production in one form or another and acting as p2p marketing). There's a real difference between what a creative producer sees and what a copyright owner sees.

The stuff that we saw on www.downhillbattle.org in class illustrates some of this issue in the music industry - I'm just saying that it happens in all creative industries.