> Which of the following two options is more likely to feed starving > children in Africa: > > 1) the Africans produce millions of pieces of valuable IPR > > 2) we take Steamboat Willie away from Disney, making it valueless > to everybody > neither one is going to help starving children. you falsely assume that "millions of pieces of valuable IPR" can be created out of thin air. the only way that information has substantial monetary value is if it is somehow important enough that people are willing to pay money for it and scarce enough that equivalent information is not avaialble elsewhere. and in most cases it costs money to make a piece of information that important or scarce - for instance by advertising it, or by suppressing the competition. > Where you cite centralized control, that control only exists because > people are not improving their own portfolios. no, that control exists because those that have wealth and control also have the means to increase that wealth and retain that control - and to encourage the government to help them do so. that and most people have better things to do with their energy than "improving their own portfolios". a world in which everybody has to hoard information in order to be competitive (read: to avoid being poor) is not a world that I find desirable in general, and certainly not desirable for the sake of preserving some folks' control over the exchange of ideas or for propping up some other folks' misguided beliefs in capitalism as an ultimate ideal. Keith