> We should rather call IP an intellectual monopoly privilege, than a right to a piece of property. Agree. And the pernicious thing with this is that, while of

> We should rather call IP an intellectual monopoly privilege, than a right to a piece of property. Agree. And the pernicious thing with this is that, while of course publishers and creators should be renumerated, doing this through scarcity, which is a natural condition in the physical world, does not make sense, as it is not a given in the virtual world, and scarcity should be avoided where possible, right? Markets basically are good because of three things: 1) enabling efficient investments, 2) decentralized decisions, 3) and efficient use. But in the virtual realm, while the first two of these are the same under scarcity, the 3rd is not, as without natural scarcity, efficient use is 3) as much use as possible. Therefore a market-like popularity algorithm (no council of old men deciding what receives money, but popularity / appreciation / number of downloads) + a levy system, or something similar, would make the on-line market work much more in the spirit of the first, physical goods market, rather than according to the letter of that market. And as the importance of virtual goods grows, it becomes more sensible to create a second market for it, so we have two free markets, instead of one. For those interested, I wrote more about this in my (history) thesis: http://www.logilogi.org/pub/Enclosures/paper.pdf http://www.logilogi.org/pub/Enclosures/paper.pdf