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Both currency and 'intellectual property' only have value because they are backed by the government. Currency is very hard to reproduce without a substantial investment and has a lot less anonymity when being used. IP, on the other hand, can be redistributed in mass with a 5 year old computer you pull out of a dumpster almost completely anonymously. Piracy just isn't going to go away without public sympathy to the cause. Its like why everyone throws a fit when you violate an OSS license but actively encourages downloading a track from the latest pop artist. The public receives value from the one and has it extracted from them by the other. People are smart and can tell when they are getting screwed even if they cant sufficiently articulate how its being done. In my opinion the only feasible way to fix the system is to bring copyright duration back to a reasonable time period, like maybe 10 years or so, with a way to extend that duration for high value properties. One way would be to declare value on that particular property, paying property tax on that value, and limiting the liability of infringement damages to that declared value. I'm not saying that piracy would go away totally at that point, but certainly more legitimate business models would emerge and even illegitimate ones would make the transition to reduce risk. Cost of enforcement would also go down as the volume of infringements decreased and those resources could be concentrated and directed along with a greater public support and sympathy. If the public can actually see that they get value out of protecting copyrights they will. If not they wont. I have zero incentive to protect the latest pop artists music if it will never go out of copyright in my life time, but if see that I can do whatever I want with it in 10 years, then yeah, I'd stick up for them and so would a lot of others. The big label/studio/publisher companies dug themselves into this mess with a money grab and pretty much lost all sympathy from everyone that they cant buy off. Their only way out of this is to either be more open with their content or go back to fair laws. Other wise, the rest of us will go on without them. It also comes down to culture. Like it or not, music, movies, books, games, software, or whatever are our culture. You just cant reasonably expect people to not not have access to their culture forever. Its fair to have to pay for the latest and greatest, but as it is now, there is pretty much zero free access to anything since 1927 and that system just doesn't work. Now with technology, people just circumvent the unfair system like they should. |