Would such artistic creation cease? Absolutely not… there is a much more primitive, intrinsic need that creation fulfills and that would not dissappear. In this strange world we would likely not have IP… or cheap-ass corporate art.

However, if you wanted a sculpture installed in the courtyard of your organization (like the Calder at Stanford Law) you’d have to convince artists to contribute out of principle rather than compensation (that is, this could broadly affect the values of society in general…).

I know this thought experiment has a lot of holes… but it’s still fun to think about the circumstances that would trivialize IP.

Yes, we all need to have a way to make money enough to live on, but I’m beginning to believe that copyright shouldn’t extend beyond a writer or artist’s own death – that it should be in place to help them survive during their life, NOT to make other people rich after the person who brought the art has passed away.

“Without patent/copyright/distribution/trade secret/foo protection, nobody would make music/software/books/inventions/bar, because there would be no profit in it”

That’s it. The single and only justification for intellectual property. And yet it is demonstrably false on its face, and can be disproven with about 8 seconds of thought. People have been making music for thousands of years and writing books for hundreds of years without the slightest protections of intellectual property. People donate software requiring only attribution in the license on a daily basis. My favorite musician du jour is MC Frontalot, who derives 0 dollars from his hard work. This justification is false.

The real justification for the existence of these rights, which nobody attempting to defend them is going to tell you, is protection of enormous profits available to large corporations who can consolidate and control distribution of the intellectual property.

To distract people from this fact, they inundate us with this meme that suggests that the violation of those rights is ‘piracy’ and ‘theft’, despite the fact that the real analogy is a ‘conversation’ where information is exchanged, because ‘piracy’ sounds much more dangerous and illict than the mechanical reduplication of magnetic bits.