[ZeagleFiend]

1. Your reductive analysis of my comment inculpates you, not me. "Whatever, kill the RIAA" is not what I said at all.

2. I was reply to someone who was talking about intellectual property as a concept. Thus, I was engaging in discussion with him, not with the thread in a more general sense.

[gurkendoktor]

I am sorry for my annoyed response.

What bothers me is that the whole issue is always reduced to the most vulnerable example, which happens to be music. But there is no reason for why the role of IP should be the same for music as it is for movies, or games, or cars, or ... - even copyrights and patents work in different ways.

To name one notable difference, great music can be produced on a hobbyist budget by a single person nowadays, and often is. The R&D that goes into cars cannot. Yet, the results of millions of dollars of R&D are just as "always existent" as an MP3 of Lady Gaga is, so by your logic must not be protected.

The interesting question is, then how do we fund it? What is the incentive for any car company to waste money on crash tests if people will copy their car as soon as they have a matching 3D scanner?

[Dove]

It is not a simple situation. In my opinion, the existing systems are all broken in some way -- including even the fully open ones. I don't want all of R&D to look like YouTube and Wikipedia.

I believe there are four hard truths about information that any solution must address:

(A) Copying is easy, and will continue to get easier. This is the essential to nature of information, and fighting it is not practical.

(B) Creating is hard, and will always be hard. Failing to recognize and compensate creators is not fair.

(C) Creating by improving on a copy is more than just an effective way to create. It is essential to the nature of creativity. Fighting this effect is not practical.

(D) Creative contributions are not additive. Determining the exact value of any one creator's contribution to a project is not practical.

Copyright as a concept fails hard on (A) and (C). I think licensing doesn't handle (D) very well. Fully open solutions have varying problems with (B). The best solution I can think of is academia's system of tenure and elaborate recognition -- and even there, the system's failure on (B) pushes people to resort to secrecy, which damages (C).

I don't have a good answer. I haven't even heard a good answer. I even think it's likely that the best answer will be many answers -- secrecy here, censorship there, openness here, copyright there, depending on the field. But I do know the problem will get a lot harder when the objects in question are not merely valuable for entertainment, but might be highly valuable for survival, highly expensive to produce, and dangerous or even potentially criminal.