> Or do you have a better idea than copyright? Capitalism. Pay for scarce goods and services on an open market. Since movies / music / etc are digital, and tha

> Or do you have a better idea than copyright? Capitalism. Pay for scarce goods and services on an open market. Since movies / music / etc are digital, and that is a number, and numbers are information, you don't restrict information. Instead, you let the free market handle it - in the absence of copyright, people still want movies, and music, and new creative feats. And those creators want to live off of creating their works. Hint: keyword is creating. So as a creator you come before the masses and say "I want to make X, but I need to eat to do so, and you want X, so let us have a mutually beneficial voluntary exchange and I'll make it". The only other thing you need is some kind of restitution system (I think) to artificially increase confidence in creators, or you end up with a reputation based insular ecosystem of the first few to meet the demand finding all the investment. It could be through investor like protection for failed projects, or it could be some program where the state provides you some stipend to attempt creative endeavors and they can deal with the arbitrage over failed works. Regardless of how you go about it, the concept is the same - stop the doublethink. Information isn't scarce. In the past, making it more scarce had value because it was still somewhat scarce. Today, information is no longer scarce. I have the means to transmit lifetimes worth of information in months / weeks / days / hours / minutes / seconds depending on your connection speeds. And I think there is something fundamentally different between the inception of copyright (make scarce information slightly more scarce to promote its creation because its creators have to endure the upfront costs of infrastructure to account for the medium scarcity of the end product) and modern information (which isn't scarce, has no investment costs besides the scarce resources that go into creating an original instance of it, and has no deployment expenses). This doesn't happen today because the short term demand for information creation is satiated by media purchase, because funding new open media would be a long term purchase. So when people have to choose between new media now or new media later, they bend over for copyright. If their choice was free media now and paying for the media they want to see made later, there wouldn't be a choice, and all that capital would (mostly)flow to content creators. : yes, it is likely in the absence of an artificial market propped up by copyright that, due to subliminal mental effects of marketing and appeal, and the fact hairless monkeys don't make entirely rational purchasing decisions, some of those funds would be redirected towards other immediate scarce goods and services rather than potential future information creation. That only reflects how bad our current system is, though - it means people overspend on media because of the existence of copyright, not through rational process, but because they are manipulated into redistributing their funds through manipulation. If you want an example of this system, look at the gooseberry movie project. Exactly how the future should be. http://gooseberry.blender.org/ http://gooseberry.blender.org/