[tzs]

For IP there is a market failure if you don't have government regulation. IP is non-rival and non-excludable, and non-rival non-excludible goods don't really work well with free markets.

There are three general ways to address that. (1) Ignore it, which tends to lead to underproduction. (2) Have the government pay for production of IP, which becomes public domain. The downside of this approach is the government has to decide which IP to pay for. (3) Give IP the necessary properties by law for it to work well with a free market. This can fix the underproduction problem but does result in underconsumption.

It might be possible to address the issue in (2) of the government deciding what gets funded. One common suggesting is to fund production through a tax on something that tends to correlate with consumption such as internet access. The money from the tax would fund creation, with the money a work earns going up the more it is downloaded. There'd have to be something to deal with cheating though.

[bdw5204]

I think there's a case for short term copyrights (28 year terms or less) but I don't think patents are necessary for innovation. You generally can't stop people from copying your food products but we still have a ton of new foods on a regular basis because inventing new food is lucrative even without a government monopoly. The extreme competition and the ability of grocery stores to come out with a store brand copycat keeps big food honest and prices low. Recently, many people have started buying store brands instead of name brands which is why there are tons of signs at the grocery store about price reductions these days.

I do think it'd be hard to make sufficient money to fund a video game or a movie without copyright because they are inherently non-scarce goods once created that can be copied at effectively zero cost. I don't think it matters for books, most of which don't make money for their authors anyway. I also don't think it matters for music because the money there is from live performances and people only care about Taylor Swift's songs because she's singing them.

If we got rid of copyright, government could subsidize the production of works that would be copyrighted by creating a UBI and/or returning to the old norm of a single income household. Many people already create these kinds of works for free and/or ask for donations.

The FOSS community, which only uses copyright law (in the case of GPL) to force FOSS code to stay FOSS or (in the case of MIT) to require attribution, illustrates what the software industry would look like without copyright. Some people, including myself at one point, even work for companies writing FOSS code. Most software companies already make money by selling support contracts, cloud services or ads rather than from selling licenses to copyrighted software so fully abolishing copyright would have surprisingly little impact on tech.