This very much follows economics.

(and stop conflating utility with market value...argh....)

We're talking about monetary value -- i.e the ability of the item to generate money.

No, just demand.

You can simulate scarcity with access provision. Else you don't get to have an economy in the digital age.

People talk like this is something new, but it's not. Sun Records made Elvis's singles. Nothing even in that analog era prevented ANY OTHER COMPANY to reproduce and sell the same singles and not give Elvis a penny. Nothing, that is, except the copyright law.

This also holds for software licenses. If digital copying means "forget about copyright law" (a prerequisite to declare that "scarcity is finished") then why should anyone respect the GPL license any more than Metallica's copyright?

You can't simulate scarcity with access provision. We've solved that. We wouldn't be having this same stupid tired runaround if access provision worked or could be made to work without being repugnant.

As for the Elvis singles, those were physical goods, housed in physical places, with physical companies. This is vastly different from people giving away byte patterns to one another--and the sooner this is accepted, the sooner we can all productively talk about it.

As for your GPL license...

I'm willing to wager that, shock, there are a lot of companies that use in-house tools having modified GPL source without publishing their changes. I'm willing to wager even more that in developing nations there are lots of IP violations of that nature occurring.

Your law means nothing if it cannot be enforced.

In short, I can modify the GPL source of an application all I like if it's an "in-house tool", and I am not required to resubmit my changes. It's only if I attempt to sell it or redistribute the application in some way that I am required to.

That is not an IP violation.