[nitrogen]

I think that the legal system and major corporations will eventually have to follow the lead of some distributed computer systems, and just accept some small losses here and there in pursuit of greater gains elsewhere (I'm thinking of how Netflix embraces nondeterminism in its* distributed systems).

I keep wanting to use "their" instead of "its", mixing the US and non-US notions of whether a corporation is a singular or plural noun.

[Silhouette]

I agree that both the law and the corporations need to adapt to reality today, which is not the same as reality a few decades ago. However, I think the particular analogy you gave there is flawed, for a reason you mentioned yourself before: there is no "kingpin" to take down in a typical P2P network or similar system, so where do the "greater gains" come from?

In my ideal dreamworld, copyright would be updated to reflect the way the world really works today, which I think essentially means a much shorter duration for copyright protection, but with a genuine effort to make it practically enforceable during that period, and toning down some of the blanket laws that mean services that exist primarily to help copyright infringement can effectively hide behind some cheap legal shield to cover their asses.