Hopefully once the large copyright industries start to realise that the current system will lack efficacy going forward, we can all unite for something better to replace the current intellectual property laws (note: I'm excluding trademarks here because that is a different matter).
Simply getting rid of IP is not the answer - this is an opportunity to completely replace them with something better.
IP law, if it worked as intended, has two consequences:
* The more quality content you produce, the more revenue you derive from it.
* The more content you consume, the higher your costs for it are.
The former is a good thing from a macroeconomic perspective - it incentivises the creation of quality content - and very few people would disagree that it is a good thing.
However, it is a bad thing to make people pay more to use more content / ideas / knowledge - from a macroeconomic perspective, if there is no marginal cost to using something, but it improves efficiency, then if more people use it, that is better for everyone.
Therefore, there is a need to decouple paying people based on how much content they produce and how useful it is (the good part) from the idea that you pay more to use more content. Some kind of flat rate (perhaps as an alternative to the current system in the interim) would be one solution - everyone pays a flat fee for blanket exemption from liability under copyright and patent law, and are obliged to cite sources for their product. Content producers declare their costs, and the received flat fees are divided to content creators / knowledge discoverers based on development costs and level of usage (direct and indirect).
There would be numerous complex cases and ways to exploit the system that would need to be closed and resolved through the courts, but I don't think it is fundamentally impossible, and it would both revitalise innovation and allow new types of content creation industries to be sustainable, reversing some of the vertical integration that currently occurs due to the current difficulty in making certain types of ideas profitable if you don't apply them yourself.
Simply getting rid of IP is not the answer - this is an opportunity to completely replace them with something better.
IP law, if it worked as intended, has two consequences: * The more quality content you produce, the more revenue you derive from it. * The more content you consume, the higher your costs for it are.
The former is a good thing from a macroeconomic perspective - it incentivises the creation of quality content - and very few people would disagree that it is a good thing.
However, it is a bad thing to make people pay more to use more content / ideas / knowledge - from a macroeconomic perspective, if there is no marginal cost to using something, but it improves efficiency, then if more people use it, that is better for everyone.
Therefore, there is a need to decouple paying people based on how much content they produce and how useful it is (the good part) from the idea that you pay more to use more content. Some kind of flat rate (perhaps as an alternative to the current system in the interim) would be one solution - everyone pays a flat fee for blanket exemption from liability under copyright and patent law, and are obliged to cite sources for their product. Content producers declare their costs, and the received flat fees are divided to content creators / knowledge discoverers based on development costs and level of usage (direct and indirect).
There would be numerous complex cases and ways to exploit the system that would need to be closed and resolved through the courts, but I don't think it is fundamentally impossible, and it would both revitalise innovation and allow new types of content creation industries to be sustainable, reversing some of the vertical integration that currently occurs due to the current difficulty in making certain types of ideas profitable if you don't apply them yourself.