A technology that could instantly clone any software service would have to be magical enough that I think its benefits would outweigh the drawback of killing a business model.

Same with movies/music: before release, nobody has a copy. It is then released subject to terms you may or may not like; nonetheless, those are the terms and if you don't like them you have no right to disregard them & make a copy anyway.

It's not like smells. Software, be it programs or movies, does not diffuse by itself to random passers by. Copies are deliberate, and each is subject to contract law.

For example, I'm producing a closed-source, proprietary piece of software to make a living. I will aggressively defend my copyright. Do I believe in copyright? No. But I'm operating in a bad system and I need to eat. In a better world, I'd be doing the same thing as work for hire for a group of actors within the industry who would collectively benefit from it, and customizing for any who had particularly unique use cases. I'd be working to reduce friction for the entire system and to make the tools that computers are generally more useful, rather than reenforcing the oligarchies of the market leaders who can pay my price (which is almost completely unrelated to my effort, but rather to the value of advantage over competitors in an underserved market.) My software being proprietary is just limiting general productivity gains and distorting the market (from whence comes it's value), and my enforcement is just limiting everyone's freedom to use their own machines.

another tl;dr, the GPL hack creates an island of freedom within a restrictive framework, and if the restrictive framework is gone there's no need to respect the GPL, a child of that framework.

We can't oppress the poor DRM artists:)

That seems ridiculously impossible and utopian right now, but I'll bet that won't always be so. How do we get there from here? I'd really like to short circuit the part where everyone that believes this is impossible or undesirable economically has to die off before this can happen.

If you could all of a sudden press a button and copy all of that infrastructure, and spin up jobs and get the recruits that they have etc. the value provided by Google would be minimized. This is the nature of progression.

What exactly is the real value made by creating Avatar when the same value can be provided for free by an uneducated child who downloads it off the internet? Shouldn't we be organizing our economy around rewarding the things that actually do provide value (ie: getting the content to the person who wants it), rather than the thing thats correlated with providing value (content creation in and of itself)? Copyright is just a miniature monopoly.

Movie theaters still provide a great value. Despite the fact that I can rent or download a movie for much cheaper I still go to them for the end experience. We need to organize the economy around incentivizing end experiences, not incentivizing correlated factors.

s/google/some company that runs on AWS

Or this: http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2010/08/17/blizza...

Edit: Ok now I see what you are saying. I stand by my argument. If your business can be duplicated by me pressing a button, your business is not providing value and the government shouldn't protect it. I don't think we are devaluing what musicians/artists do, but instead what distributors do. Concert sales are up, record sales are down. This makes sense to me.

So most web businesses are not providing value. Neither are any other software businesses. Neither are authors.

Except that loads of people want and need software and websites and books. Somehow it seems like this scarcity-based, property-based system of valuation doesn't work well.

Who wants to build the start-up that disrupts capitalism?

If you cure cancer but you keep it in your basement should you be rewarded for that?

If you know the cure for cancer, but you didn't invent it yourself, should you be prevented from spreading it?

Your argument is that you never get the cure for cancer without incentivizing someone with the financial rewards to do it, which is a fair one logically, but in the case of the reality of the music industry it's quite simply not what's happened (the RIAA themselves have funded studies that actually showed piracy increasing profits). Instead the music market has been enlarged, and the RIAA is simply getting less of it. This is a Good Thing.

My argument is not inline with the entertainment industry because I am arguing that copyright infringement should no longer be a crime. People who provide the value of getting valued ideas to people should be paid for it, regardless of who created the idea. Publishers don't provide the value of creating or spreading ideas, they provide the value of selling a copy of an idea. We shouldn't give them licenses that says they do anything else because they don't.