> For example, I've spent the past six years of my life writing a book...In a world where that happens all the time, many people would be simply unwilling or un

> For example, I've spent the past six years of my life writing a book...In a world where that happens all the time, many people would be simply unwilling or unable to invest that high fixed cost and those goods wouldn't exist at all. Honestly the world would be better off. If anyone wants to go off on their own for six years and etch out their own symphony—that's great! All the freedom to them. But that's not something we should subsidize as society by restricting everyone else's intellectual freedoms. Most books are 10x - 100x too long and are mostly a regurgitation of existing ideas. We need more people collaborating on items like Wikipedias and RISC-Vs and Linux Kernels and fewer people trying to generate some new "novel" thing which they have a monopoly over. We shouldn't ever disbar someone from creating whatever they want, but we need to stop pretending like these things are worth a fortune. They're not. The big winners are only making a fortune because of these monopoly laws, not because they are orders of magnitude better than the alternatives. > those goods wouldn't exist at all. The data is overwhelming that the critical, most important goods get created just fine without copyright and patent protection. TCP/IP, WWW, Wikipedia, the majority of all essential medicines, critical NIH databases, et cetera. The goods we get from copyrights and patents are the junk like Oxycontin, Microsoft Windows (how much have we paid for in security lapses), CNN and NYTimes and FoxNews.