Intellectual property was and is a compromise designed to foster the private provisioning of what are essentially "public goods" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good). It's easy to argue that the compromise has tilted too far in favor of producers, but abolishing those protections instead of limiting them might be a step too far in the other direction.
A public good issue is, say, when you build a dam that helps an entire flood valley, and people living there can get the benefit of your work without paying you, by refusing to agree to any contract with you. I don't see that an author faces that kind of issue.
Enforcing a contract is another matter, and has become very hard for some types of intellectual property, but that is different than a public good problem, in which no one is breaking the law.
It's a tough problem. People like Stallman would like to have the government step in and take charge (if I've understood his position correctly), but I think that's a terrible solution. You could just leave things to "Coasian solutions", which is what a lot of open source software seems to be (the Apache web server, for instance), but you would probably never get stuff like the things Apple produces in that case. Custom software, governed by contracts between two parties, probably wouldn't suffer as much.
Music downloaders are not free riders. They've broken the law (at least the uploader has clearly broken his contract with the artist not to do this). In a classic public good case, like the flood valley and dam, the difficulty is that people who own property in the valley, and break no laws by continuing to farm there, benefit from the flood control that the dam owner can't prevent from affecting their property.
Which is only a problem because it gives them an incentive to get their neighbors to pay for the dam, while not doing so themselves.
As a copyright producer of both music and software I really feel copyright protection is moral and just. The damages awarded for copyright infringement for personal use are clearly ridiculous and should be seriously limited. Also I think both copyrights and patents terms should be reduced and the originality threshold for patents has to be increased. Each patent term should be determined separately with reference to how expensive something has been to bring to market and how novel it is.
That of course is not to say that the balance is a good one right now, still, it's not just the producers that benefit, it's the public who gets access to things the producer creates because he/she has a means to make some money from it.
In my option IP law does little to promote the creation of quality works instead it promotes churning out low quality crap because you must pay before you can view. IMO you could produce a much more effective system by limiting the High Definition version of a movie while not protecting a standard definition copy of a movie. Thus you could watch any movie for free but you would need to pay to see it in HD or in theaters.
You could do the same thing with books and movies. You're free to download a text file but if you want the pictures or fancy formatting you need to buy it. Ditto for low bit rate MP3 vs. lossless copies.
I'm not sure what the answers are, but I still like the idea of looking at it as a compromise between producers and consumers that should give something to each one. Giving nothing to the producers will discourage production of those kinds of goods. Give too much power to the producers in an age where copying is so easy means using fairly heavy-handed and invasive government power to enforce their rights.
Probably more information than you needed.
Information is inherently free because information is basically numerical, and anyone can (potentially) think of any number. However, information is only useful when the numbers are correlated with actions or objects. It's this correlation that is truly valuable, and the creation of the correlation requires resources (i.e. time and energy).
That day is today, actually. http://thepiratebay.org/
There are not contracts that stand up in court under those circumstances. There clearly is no real contract here -- where "contract" assumes "agreement".
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YWI5ZDVjODBkZDI2YWM...
Excerpt:
It appears Gates is ignoring the global spread of free-market capitalism that has successfully lifted hundreds of millions of people up from poverty and into the middle class over the last decade or so. Think China. Think India. Think Eastern Europe (and maybe even France under Sarkozy). Gates wants business leaders to dedicate more time to fighting poverty. But the reality is that economic freedom is the best path to prosperity. Period.
The Heritage/WSJ 2008 Index of Economic Freedom clearly shows that free-market countries are prospering mightily. Per capita GDP is closely related to, and positively correlated with, market economies. The fact is that free-market economics is spreading like wildfire. State socialism is on the decline. Unsurprisingly, the study also shows that the least-free economies are mired in poverty. We're talking North Korea, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Iran, and others.
Thus, after removing these obviously misplaced sentences and paragraphs, NRO's article basically turns into a lonely link to WSJ without any corresponding commentary.
3 will lead to cheaper medicines in the short run, but much less research in the long run, which is bad for everybody.
4 is mostly a problem for western european countries with high unemployment like France and Germany. It's irrelevant to the world's poor, who don't work in the legal economy anyway.
Environmental policy is not especially harmful to the poor, and whether or not recorded facts genuinely point to a need for it will always be extremely contentious.
I'd add: better legal protection of property in poor countries, and less bureaucracy. A must-read in this area is "The Mystery of Capitalism: Why It Succeeds In The West And Fails Everywhere Else." Major eye-opener!
http://www.amazon.com/Mystery-Capital-Capitalism-Triumphs-Ev...
This book has some good history of "the early years", when it wasn't clear that MS would be the winner that took all:
http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/10/in-search-of-stupi...
Here are some good starting points for helping the world's poor:
1) End the practice of propping up corrupt foreign governments with aid
2) Stop subsidising first world farmers and thereby killing the markets for the second and third world (including flow-on effects coming from ludicrous things like ethanol subsidy)
3) Governments cease support for rent-seeking measures like copyright and patents.
4) Abolish government-enforced wage floors which subsidise the low income earners at the expense of the genuinely poor by preventing business from finding employment for them.
5) Don't make environmental policy until recorded facts genuinely point to a need for it.
Everywhere around us the invisible hand of the state is interfering in our lives through pork-barrelling schemes that benefit those close to power at the expense of the rest. The big lie is in the claim that we have now is capitalism. Even in the United States, what we first world countries have now is better referred to as 'mixed economies'. They have elements of capitalism but are some distance from actual capitalism.