Because greed is good!.. well, the business people's greed only, not the consumers' greed. Obviously.

at the root of this is the question of ownership. Digital goods have a questionable concept of ownership vs access through rental fees. If i buy a book, it is mine and i can do with it what i please.

That concept is much easier to implement with a physical object as opposed to a digital one.

No disagreement from me - I think digital goods lay bare the dirty secret that "ownership" is a social norm, not any sort of real truth.

I also think that digital goods remove any sort of "harm" that can be reasonably expressed from having your sole ownership removed.

If you own a digital book, and I copy it - you are not deprived of your digital book. We both now own it.

It seems to me that a robust model based around funding the creation of new work, rather than the sale of work, is a much more efficient and ethical solution than any sort of government enforced IP.

Capitalism relies on the basic system of supply and demand. When the marginal supply is free - the only proper price is zero - anything else isn't pure Capitalism. And so as free would mean no incentives to actually create anything, we give an even worse of a hack to deal with it, ownership.

You don't want to fund the creation, funding the creation is inherently risky. Let the creators bear that risk, they know more than any central governing entity. A better way to deal with this is to discover what the intrinsic value for the product is, allow the creator to give it away, and then subsidize the creator the value they generated as it accrues month-by-month.

The nice thing with this system is that we can transition to it really easily. There are already many Open Source projects that exist, all we need to do is ear-mark a certain sized pot, figure out the weights of existing products, and hand it out. And as the economy gets stronger, allow the pot to grow, and eventually there might not be a thing as closed software, as open software will always be able to generate more value than closed.

I believe it is possible to do so through a modified Vickrey auction wherein real money is used. A Vickrey auction is one in which the winners pays the price the second place bidder placed - or as I prefer to look at it, the first loser. Vickrey auctions are great because they get the bidder to bid their true value. This gives us good data to determine what a certain product is worth. In this modified Vickrey auction the top 50%(or some other optimizing number we can work out) of bidders win, and they all pay the price of the highest non-winner.

So that would mean that 50% of people get access, and we're turning away 50%. But we can do better than that, as we know from sampling, we don't need to know everyone's values to get a good idea of what something is worth, so we can use sortition to decide if a given user is even going to bid in the first place. So this might mean for a given product you only sample 0.01%, and then only 0.005% go without. That seems rather fair to me. Once we have a value for a product, the next year we might not even have an auction for it, and everyone would get access to it.

And we can do better than that, since the money is being subsidized, and presumably this would result in a more efficient society, the money collected through these auctions need not fund the subsidy. What we can instead do is have the auction results just be given to everyone who opts into the sortition process similar to the carbon price and dividend system. Anyone who uses less than the median amount would see that their time spent valuing products as a net-postive, and anyone who doesn't want to vote doesn't get their cut.

We would then use these weights to give away all grant money. This might mean that Firefox can be funded exclusively through this pot, and they would no longer be beholden to Google for default Search. It would mean the grant writing process would go away. Eventually the pot would grow so large that even private products, wanting a cut of their own, go open source. It would mean, as ads make products less valuable, that ads go away.

The concept only makes sense for physical objects.

The problem are the definitions of "piracy", "robbery", "theft", etc.

There's two ways you could reasonably define them: by the loss, or by the gain.

From a simple ethical/logical viewpoint it stands to reason that if a gain can occur without a loss, that's good for everyone - so we should define theft to have occurred only when a loss is incurred (and hence intellectual property theft wouldn't be theft, and the very concept of IP makes no sense).

Unfortunately just because it's good for everyone doesn't mean it'll obviously work out that way. Defining theft by the unauthorised gain of something (regardless of whether there was a loss) lets those with the authority to grant rights to those gains profit. That profit can then be used to create incentives for others with authority (through lobbying, for instance), creating a situation where despite the fact that it's in the common interest to define theft solely on the basis of loss, it's in the interest of those with authority to define it as any gain which is not approved by an anointed member of the authority structure (either economically or politically).

Intellectual property is stupid, counter-productive, hurts culture, hurts innovation, and generally doesn't do an ounce of good to the vast majority of people on the planet Earth.

> Intellectual property is stupid, counter-productive, hurts culture, hurts innovation, and generally doesn't do an ounce of good to the vast majority of people on the planet Earth.

Further, and this is the one that really kills me: Countries/Companies that ignore IP have a serious competitive advantage.

It's not only more ethical, it's also more efficient. It's folly to believe that IP laws will protect you against these motivated actors, and playing the game internally is slowing us down and hampering our own performance.

There's nothing wrong with payment for creating public domain work. As you said, this can be done today.

However, it's fairly limiting if that's the only way copywrite material can be compensated.

For example, I enjoy paying to see a movie that I want to see once it's out and has been reviewed. What I don't want, is to crowd-fund the movies I think I want to watch in 3-5 years from now.

If, once created, copyright becomes public domain how do you see big IP's being funded realistically?