> The idea is that in a completely unregulated market, it is impossible to make money from ideas after they are made public. Since making ideas public is good f

> The idea is that in a completely unregulated market, it is impossible to make money from ideas after they are made public. Since making ideas public is good for society, we want to encourage people to continue to do this. This reasoning is taken at face value in most discussion but should be challenged. A lot of assumptions and potentially specious logic is embedded here, and it's not clear and obvious that any of the following are true: * it is impossible to make money from ideas after they are made public * Paying people to encourage making ideas public increases the amount of value * most ideas are worth anything at all * that the most valuable ideas will be made public even with these protection regimes in place It's arguable that even though there was less information out there before copyrights and patents became a thing, that people were still driven to create art and science, and the quality per unit might have even been higher. And even with patent and copyright in place, truly valuable ideas are still kept secret. The core value proposition of copyrights and patents is to make middlemen money.