| Akvod said: Imagine a world without property rights. Anarchy in that respect only. Forgetting being able to take anything from anybody, lets stick with IP. Medical companies have no incentive to fund research, it'll probably go to the government completely (whether you think that's good or bad is up to you), you'll have absolutely no clue what you're buying, as anyone can use the well known brand name and even designs (so you essentially have a bootleg market). Production value will go down (doesn't necessarily mean that the music or game will be worse. Just that the budgets will go down). |
There is a difference between IP laws and copyright protection.
Intellectual property, in some form, always exists since property exists. "It is my plan, my story, my painting, don't use it." A world without IP laws would need to be a utopian communist society where everyone gets everything, and artist only work for the sake of art, scientists invent things only for science, and Starfleet officers voluntarily explore the Galaxy just for fun, and virtue.
On the other hand, copyright protection laws rose around the industrial revolution, when mass production was expensive, and copying it was a big deal. Getting profits from it was just a side effect, since the product was sold for profit, the IP owner could keep it, and thus, directly selling the IP material for money became the standard business model. In any other situation, they would have been forced to find another source of revenue.
Now the Internet is changing things again. It is the Information Age. Copying things is no longer a big deal. Every downloading is a copy. When you use a copyrighted character as your avatar, you copy it. When you get rickrolled, you copy that song into your PC's memory from Youtube. When you take a screenshot from the game you are playing, and you copy the on-screen characters that are the publisher's IP.
As music, gaming, books, and films are getting changed to Digital Distribution, people start wondering: what stops them from copying them as casually as they copy every other data in their life? Some old obscure law from an age when copying was big deal?
Publishers might keep their IPs, but they MUST soon find new ways for revenue instead of selling the product for a price, as there is no longer a product, just some sort of service.
