From Wikipedia:

“The main conflict of the book occurs as the “individuals of the mind” go on strike, refusing to contribute their inventions, art, business leadership, scientific research, or new ideas of any kind to the rest of the world. Society, they believe, hampers them by interfering with their work and underpays them by confiscating the profits and dignity they have rightfully earned. The peaceful cohesiveness of the world requires those individuals whose productive work comes from mental effort. But feeling they have no alternative, they eventually start disappearing from the communities of “looters” and “moochers” who bleed them dry. The strikers believe that they are crucial to a society that exploits them, and the near-total collapse of civilization their strike eventually triggers shows them to be correct.”

Under the citation for “Atlas Shrugged”

Works of the US Federal Government (including works for hire) are supposed to be public domain, are they not?

Regardless, copying the look of something is not “theft”, nor is profiting from someone else’s work. It happens all the time. Mechanics profit from the work of GM and Ford, without whose crappy vehicles nobody would have reason to use their services. We all profit in some way from side benefits from things we don’t necessarily pay for.

A smoothly functioning economy generates surplus over time (grows), and those who help grow that surplus get to capture SOME of the value of that surplus, as a rule. There is no entitlement to profit at all — businesses can and do go bankrupt routinely. This too is normal.

Problems start when some business, or whole sector, gets it into their heads that they’re somehow ENTITLED to profit regardless of market conditions, or even to capture ALL the value of the surplus they create. Enforcing their wishes effectively would require a police state — and the spillover surplus would be gone. That spillover serves important social and economic roles. It’s the “rising tide that floats all boats”, the means by which the general standard of living can raise over time instead of those enriched necessarily being so at the expense of someone else being impoverished. If everyone captures all the value from their productivity surplus, the tide ebbs, and most of them, ironically, run aground on the rocks.

The spillover isn’t theft, or freeloading; it’s part of the mechanism’s lubrication. Without it, the economy grinds to a halt, and civilization collapses.

As for reprinting Wikipedia content without permission, you can do that — the text is all under the GFDL.

As for the Atlas Shrugged stuff? Bogeyman stories to frighten small children and gullible adults into favoring stricter IP policy. It won’t happen — the world innovated just fine before anyone had even thought of any of this IP BS, and it will continue to do so when it joins things like apartheid, alcohol prohibition, or the divine rights of kings in the dusbin of history.

In fact the scenario outlined in Atlas Shrugged can’t happen. It goes against human nature and the laws of economics. Workers “of the mind” always will be able to find work, because their talents are scarce and valuable, even if copies of stuff are cheap and abundant. And in practise, who do you see pushing for strong IP laws? Scientists, doctors, and computer programmers? Nope. Not even, most of the time, singers, actors, and other entertainers either. Mostly men in business suits, some of them lawyers, others upper management types, all of them rent-seeking parasites. Some work for Microsoft. Some for the RIAA. None work for the people, or for innovation, and they tend to oppose the people and innovation to at least the extent that those threaten their business models. They aren’t propelling civilization forward. Far from it — they are holding it back.

Not that they can, any more than Sisyphus could keep his boulder at the top of the hill where it was gravitationally unstable. And civilization weighs a lot more than a boulder. It’s rolling, gaining speed, and the nutty IP-pushers are standing there in its path with their arms out yelling “Stop!”. Within a few short years, they get run down by progress barreling ahead, and within a couple dozen, the world begins to change rapidly and in ways we can’t currently even imagine. There isn’t anything that can stop it, short of an asteroid strike with very unfortunate timing, or maybe some nut actually succeeding in starting world war three.

You may not believe it yet, but those drooling idiots with their precious outmoded business models aren’t even a serious threat anymore. Just wait a short while and listen for the “squish”…