> One moral justification is that the ability to own and profit from intellectual property gives people a powerful incentive to create and share new things. V

> One moral justification is that the ability to own and profit from intellectual property gives people a powerful incentive to create and share new things. Very little is new in the tabula rasa sense. Just look at Disney movies. I'm hard pressed to think of any of them that is not derived from something in either contemporary popular culture, or ancient stories. the notion may have held up when it covered written stories in printed books, and only for a limited (20 years, iirc) period. This because the time window was relatively short, and because the number of book printers were low and thus easily policed. In this day and age, i can produce a million digital copies of the bible in a second.