[dmitrynts]

You caught me off guard (I just woke up ) so I read it.

Constructive comments:

1. It is really too long.

2. You go off on too many tangents.

3. You overstretch the analogies. The tragedy of the commons isn't really relevant to copyright as far as I can see.

4. You did not finish the last "thought experiment" - how does the broken window fallacy explain how people are going to make money in world without copyright?

5. This is wrong:

The central idea which organised all these resources of information – and the industries that grew around them – was that it would be scarce. Now, however, it is no longer so, and so the assumptions of classical economics no longer hold when in comes to trying to understand how information moves on the network (given sufficient bandwidth – which we already have). It also means that the industries and all other information infrastructure based on the old economic assumptions are suddenly misfits in the new world, because the one thing that made them valuable – the scarcity of the information which they were providing – now does not exist.

Granting monopolies on use of information was never based on the idea of information being scarce, it was always based on the idea that producers of valuable information were scarce. And of course, the idea that it is beneficial to the wider society to grant them monopolies and thus encourage them.

I agree with you that intellectual property rights aren't fundamental rights, nor even very logical rights. They are thus not something that shoud not be examined. On the contrary, they should be inspected and analyzed and modified as needed. And kept only if we conclude that they indeed are beneficial to the society.

I've previously examined the topic a bit, trying to see how such monopolies (primarily patents) affected economic growth.

Today the most productive countries have the strictest IP laws, but were those laws instrumental in those countries becoming the richest? I didn't go too deep, but I didn't find any definitive answer to the question. The IP protection systems have evolved alongside Western capitalism, so it is hard to examine the effect of one on the other.

The failure of Soviet exports is interesting though. Take their lack of success in the sphere of microelectronics. The Soviet system, in which the incentive system for innovators did exist but was very different than in the West, failed to produce Apple, Xerox, Micorsoft or anything like that. If Bill Gates had to grind all day away coding pathfinding algorithms for ballistic missiles in State Bureau of Minor Steel Products, we todays perhaps wouldn't have Windows.

I don't like too many such examples as they are only anecdotal evidence (if even that). But you do need a good incentive system (I think) for technological progress.

Today's system in which countries like China have very loose IP laws is also interesting. Let's see if countries outside West who aren't subject to restrictive regulation (it is not completely avoidable because IP laws are parto of the WTO, but many countries agree on paper and don't uphold them) become centers of innovation. I'm not holding my breath.