> You are limiting what can be created in the world. Not really true. You could say that IP limits some forms of use that could produce new creations. But th

> You are limiting what can be created in the world. Not really true. You could say that IP limits some forms of use that could produce new creations. But that would ignore the fact that often IP is licensed, thus not preventing the creation of some content. Further, providing a reward for the creation of new IP dramatically increases the overall creation rate of what society considers to be "useful" IP. > No we did not. Historically, Intellectual property was created as one more monopoly privilege for the monarchy That's just an ad hominem. > At no point in history did we, as a society, conclude that if we limit reward producers it would add to the useful aggregate. See, this is just factually incorrect. All you need to do is to look at US history and the motivations for creating copyright and patent law as part of the new nation to see that you're wrong. The saddest thing is that I actually think that our system of IP is in serious need of a rewrite. The way that big media companies abuse our legal system and the power of our government should be criminalized. At very least, we should be using statistical models and the Scientific method to determine the ideal values for copyright and patent lengths rather than basing new IP laws upon the lobbying efforts of Disney. That said, as an advocate for changing the situation, you're not being effective. You make totally unfounded arguments and in at least one other place in this same thread I saw where you were using cheap online debating tricks to try to get your point across. When I read the original article this thread is based on, I felt some legitimate annoyance at the professor since what he's doing is unethical. But then I read a couple of your posts and felt I needed to respond to arguments that were remarkably uninformed and disingenuously constructed.