There's a website called The Pirate Bay to provides a search engine to help find video content to download using Bit Torrent (a file sharing application). They are currently being prosecuted in Sweden for assisting copyright violations (source http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7895026.stm).
The main shareholder in The Pirate Bay, Gottfrid Svartholm, is a bit right wing to put it mildly (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfrid_Svartholm); anti-imigrant, Sweden for the Swedish, that level of nonsense. So, I'm no particular fan of his, or of his creations.
But I am intersted in the case because of the questions it raises. Do you have a right to make a profit, and if so, who has a right to make a profit and in what way? Does everything have a price?
on one side of the court case you have the movie and music industry that complain that The Pirate Bay allows people to copy their movies and music without payment. On the other side, The Pirate Bay claims to make its money from web advertising and that they simply provides a search engine to specialised web content outside of their control, just like Google. It will be interesting to see which way the case goes in the end.
Not surpsingly, if you have ever red much of my blog, my view is "a plague on both your houses".
My argument is that, yes, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says that we have a right to a private life, but I see nothing that says that a private life requires the unfettered right to make a profit.
Do you have a right to make a movie? Well you certainly have a right to free expression, and in the modern world one of the pathways to that is through making movies.
Do you have the right to make money from your movie? Well, you have the right to distribute it, that's what freedom of expression means. You also have the right to associate with people who want to make movies and watch them. Assuming that anyone wants to see them of course.
Commerce itself is part of an economic system, involves all of society, and is very public. It is simply one way for private individuals to interact with each other and with the state. So its only one of many public means to an end, and not part of your private life.
So, on blance, I'd say you only have the right to make money by selling your movie if society as a whole, on the basis of an informed decision, agrees to that economic model. Whether it does or not doesn't affect your rights.
Personally, for many activities, I would question the use of that commercial model. I don't want people to make a profit out of policing, healthcare, soldiering, or teaching for a start. Then there are things like providing water and sanitation, electicity, gas, telephony, public transport, social care, prisons, law... None of which would I want some company thinking, "I'll do it this way, make this short-cut, to make more money".
I don't think I'm alone in my views. In fact, I suspect that given such a list, I would get quite a few supporters, and for many of the professions and services in the list, I would get a majority.