> Imagine you’re creating a new country and you want people to make things, how can you incentivize this? You could pay them? > One way is to give people who

> Imagine you’re creating a new country and you want people to make things, how can you incentivize this? You could pay them? > One way is to give people who make things a small time where they can make money from their creations, especially in cases where creating the thing requires a lot of capital investment (drug discovery). Yeah, you could claim the right to put your hands on anyone who made a copy of a creation, because you want people to make stuff and penalizing anyone other than the first person to make a thing helps the original artists get paid. Of course if you wanted to incentivize creators you could also not punish them for copying other creators because the copy is another creation that you claim to want. > Without copyright the bigger players and distributors make all the money. Honestly I think its the other way around, you have to be big enough to hire a lawyer to enforce your copyright, and the bigger you are, the more / better lawyers you can get. Mickey Mouse and Disney are the ur-counterexample here. > The only model possible is some donation based scheme which doesn’t work for high capital investment projects. Without patents companies keep everything a trade secret. There’s a lot of stuff in the modern world that would not exist in this one and a lot of people that make their money creating things that could not do so without IP law. Perhaps we would be better off without all of this. > Is copyright and patent law broken from first principles or in conflict with useful incentive structure in society? No. Hard disagree. Yes it is.