You cannot be “deprived of profit.” That makes no sense. Nobody is owed any profit for simply trying to sell something.

If I create art to sell, and nobody buys it, I haven’t been robbed of anything at all. And that fact doesn’t change if somebody walks past my art booth, looks at my painting, admires it, and then walks away. They didn’t “steal” anything from me. I haven’t been deprived of anything. Unless you want to make the claim that they are a thief now that they enjoyed my painting without paying my anything for it.

If that’s true, then everybody who walks through an art fair or gallery but doesn’t buy any art is a robber and should be arrested and charged.

The idea that IP protects the little folks who are struggling artists is a capitalist myth perpetuated primarily by corporate advocates that are the actual beneficiaries of IP laws. It’s used by mega-corps to lock down massive amounts of content, make billions off of it, exploit actual artists to perpetuate their monopoly on creative expressions of characters.

It’s also used by pharma corps to artifically restrict supply of critical drugs to the population in order to make billions in profits and enrich their shareholders.

And the whole, “nobody would create anything if copyright/patents didn’t exist” is yet another capitalist myth, disproved by countless examples. As if the entire internet doesn’t run on the back of Linux, a free and open source project spanning literal decades, Wikipedia, the largest single encyclopedia of human knowledge in dozens of languages, all the millions of pages of fan fiction and hobbiest artists that have created passion projects with no expectation of making money. Etc etc.

Don’t buy into the propaganda.