Even if we had infinite space, land would still be scarce: like an IP address, we can't all use the same lawn. On the other hand, the property of land would be

Even if we had infinite space, land would still be scarce: like an IP address, we can't all use the same lawn. On the other hand, the property of land would be well accepted, and easy to enforce: people would just take what they need, plus a suitable margin. The same is (or can be) applied to IPv6 now. As for the scarcity of movies. Well, that's a tough one. First, there is no way I can actually steal a movie —short of abducting the director, stealing the props… I mean, all I can do is download a copy at almost zero charge. Even if I shoplift a DVD, that's not stealing the movie, that's stealing a plastic disc. The problem is, the value of the film is completely decorrelated from its scarcity. As you say, it takes resources to make a film: time, cameras, actors, props… most of which are scarce —some are not, like stock footage. Once the film is done however, the film itself is not scarce at all: it can be copied over and over at near zero cost. The easy way out is to go back to scarcity: you know how to monetize it: just sell the artificially scarce copies. But this is obviously not ideal. Our world is sufficiently flawed as it is, adding artificial scarcity on top of it doesn't sound like a great idea. Hence the question: how do you distribute something abundant when the production of the first copy consumes scarce resources? I don't know. But people are working on it, and have produced some ideas that are worth trying: global licence, basic income… Or maybe just lower the length of the granted monopolies, like 10 years after publication or so. Even if we can't abolish artificial scarcity altogether, we might be able to reduce it.