[velosol]

There's a sci-fi plot there: those with money can afford to pay the copyright cost for material they've learned and anything they produce results in royalties to the creators of everything they've learned. Those without means are cast out, perhaps some generating original thoughts in a way that breaks the system. I think I'm going to have to re-read the Unincorporated Man.

[seanmcdirmid]

We aren't so far away from that, and it is becoming cheap enough that you won't even need money anymore. Rather than bootleg movies, people will just ask computers to derive a new movie from multiple existing movies, and then...it is an original work?