>I think we'd all be better off if basically everything was open source, by way of eliminating intellectual property protections provided by governments. Ok, b

>I think we'd all be better off if basically everything was open source, by way of eliminating intellectual property protections provided by governments. Ok, before going a single step farther it has to be prefaced: this entire sentence is utterly non-sensical because "open source" is 100% based upon intellectual property protections provided by governments. That was the whole genius of it from the start, that it made use of existing IP law for an entirely new purpose and direction. But you can try out "eliminating IP protections" yourself right now, it's called Public Domain. Try releasing your work as that, and, should it be sufficiently popular/valuable, see exactly how long it stays "open source". No IP = no open source, because by definition with no IP anyone can take it and do whatever they want with it, including using technological rather then legal protections. Going beyond that though, so far the people I've seen entirely reject IP don't seem to understand exactly what the IP-hack is for. The absolute core, fundamental problem is thus: Unlike matter, the replication of information is (effectively) free, but the generation of information most certainly is not. Also unlike matter, the "protection" of information fundamentally represents a societal cost. The result is a resource allocation problem, though with a set of collective twists. As infinite resources do not exist, and only some information is of value, it is desirable to have some way to efficiently allocate resources to the generation of "valuable" information, but then also have that provide the most efficient value and effect in society overall. Protecting information individually isn't fully possible, and any temporary ways to do so are highly inefficient to all parties. Protecting information cooperatively can be more efficient, but represents an ongoing an cumulative societal cost. Untangling this particular Gordian Knot of conflicting priorities is tricky but also of critical importance, and I doubt we have arrived at the best solution yet. But so far Intellectual Property seems to be the best one. IP is basically a hack to try to apply Free Market mechanisms (so massively distributed value appraisal with a capital intermediary/feedback) to information generation, while (at least theoretically) taking into account the significant differences between information and physical property. This means restrictions on what exactly is worthy of IP, categories for different types of protection to address different generation issues, a crude attempt to deal with the cumulative cost issue via limited lifetimes (which has been corrupted), etc. It is unfortunately subject to all the standard problems with societal programs: regulatory capture, perverse incentives, struggling to get out of local minima that are far from absolute minima, and so on. But that some of this is a challenge doesn't mean that throwing out the baby with the bathwater is a good idea either. No matter what the information generation problem in a limited resource world is not going to go away, and a polity utilizing an inferior solution is going to be less efficient at it and thus, over time, lose out to polities that utilize IP. So I think your efforts are much, much better focused on trying to wrest back the balance of the IP process so that the hack, however ugly, better matches the constraints. Bring back shorter time limits is an easily graspable idea, if anything modern networks and systems that drastically reduce time-to-market and distribution costs should result in a lower, not longer, lifetime. Better still would be some sort of reactive measure so that IP can more optimally respond to its value, like an exponentially increasing yearly maintenance cost after a minimum period. There are lots of different good ideas out there. But please resist blanket "easy" solutions to something that very much is not easy unless you've really thought through the universal problem space and have arguments as to why your replacement is better then the existing regime.