> > Let us dedicate ourselves to the worldwide abolishment of the > > provisions in intellectual property laws - copyrights, patents, and > > trademarks - which stifle the freedom of expression and the development > > of a gloabl marketplace of ideas, to reinforce the upward spiral of > > real value (not to be confused with money) that the citizens of the > > world can create with the Internet's help. > > The solution to the IPR problem is to make it so that everybody can have > and generate as much of their own IPR as they wish, rather than to take > from those that already have it. I disagree. People already can, at least in theory, generate as much as their own intellectual property as they wish - and the problems still exist. There are several problems here, so I doubt there is "a" single solution. But current IPR laws err in several ways: They treat information and ideas as if they were similar to tangible property, useful only to the person who possesses the property, therefore subject to scarcity and to the laws of supply and demand. They assume that the public benefits, and "progress in science and useful arts" is furthered, by making information in general artifically scarce. There are limited circumstances when this is the case, but in general it is not. Often information becomes more valuable to everyone when it is made available to everyone. They assume that publication (copying) is expensive, requiring a substantial investment in resources, and therefore that controlling the act of copying is a reasonable way to protect authors' investments in creating their works. (e.g. the owner of a printing press has made a substantial investment in that press and therefore has assets that he/she doesn't want to lose in a copyright infringement suit) They provide property rights to information indefinitely, rather than for a limited time. At the same time, they fail to provide any incentives to the public to preserve information in its original form without change after the copyright expires. There are many more bad assumptions in current IPR laws, but these will suffice for an illustration. > In an information economy, information is currency. The benefit of an > information capitalism is that everybody who wants to participate can > generate their own wealth. And the downside of information capitalism is that it facilitates control over the many by those few who possess "crucial" pieces of information - the information produced by everyone else is nearly useless in comparison. Ironically, what you call "information capitalism" encourages centralized control. The public does not benefit by creating incentives to hoard crucial information. > This is not a defense of extensions. I also feel that Disney et al should > have been investing in new assets rather than working to lockup old > assets. Rather, this is the counter-point to your specific statement > above. Having billions of pieces of IPR is better than having none. I prefer to envision a world where people contribute information for the greater common good more often than they try to hoard it for the sake of having complete control. Which is not to say that creators wouldn't benefit from people using their works - just that giving creators complete control over their works as if they were "property" is very much against the public interest. Keith