>As I have had many debates on this subject
> here at Rinkworks, I was curious to hear
>the thoughts of others on the subject and
>the particular ideas raised here.
>Don

A good friend of mine feels ethically obligated to violate copyright law, and he argues persuasively for that position. I'll be a little more conventional.

>This problem can be truly fixed only by changing people, not machines. [...]
>I honestly don't know how to bring about a sea change in people's feelings about intellectual property.

These sentences poked out for me because they both zoom right past what I view as the real issue.

I'm a fan of natural rights, as in "life, liberty, and property." Property, and private property especially, is essential to human prosperity, for reasons others have explained and I'll just ignore. But the definitions of property quite naturally change under different circumstances, because not everyone everywhere everywhen is served by the same rigid descriptions of property.

This may be an analogous situation: for the early cattlemen in the American West, land was abundant but water was scarce--the opposite of the situation back east. It would have been financially impossible to fence in the vast tracts needed for grazing, especially if every ranch needed to border a creek. Therefore, they ditched the common law, and they replaced it with other property rules more suited to their own success. Not until the invention of barbed wire fencing did it become feasible to return to the traditional schemes of land division.

It is appropriate (in my opinion) that a technology-driven society have intellectual property laws; without them, invention would doubtless occur at a similar rate, but the rewards would not as frequently go to the inventors. We think it is more fair for the inventors to be the ones to profit. However, it is a mistake to assume that the current way IP laws are set up is the only way, an appropriate way, or even a particularly good way. Here's a simple economic principle to follow: **Property rights should only be defined in a way that can be enforced. If the costs of enforcing the rights are greater than the gain from enforcing them, then the definitions of those rights must be changed, or abandoned.**

Regarding the analogy, I think we're at a point like the cattlemen before barbed wire. We require a change in the definition of copyrights, at least until technology comes up with a solution.

Here's one proposal about differently arranging copyrights: http://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedmsr/303.html
Rothbard thought we had it precisely backwards: http://www.ccsindia.org/murray.pdf
Here's one I didn't read, but it has a good title: http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/6805/student-papers/fall95-papers/tanen-taping.html
Some have suggested the government just buy out the most valuable IP, such as pharmaceuticals, and make them instantly generic.

-Gabe