> And what about the fact that, on the whole, most people are apparently fine with having access to things rather than ownership of them? How do you make the distinction when it matters, but allow both types of transactions?
We could engorge the commons. If people are okay with mere access, then (for easy-to-distribute things, like books and videogames) free culture should naturally outcompete comparable proprietary works.
Promote DRM-free cultural artefacts. If you'd drop $70 on a AAA title, drop $70 on a DRM-free game you like, and then tell your friends about it. (Try-before-you-buy is a feature, not a bug, though don't be stingy about this if you can afford not to.)
This isn't generally-applicable, of course, but deconstructing the "everything is property" schema might make it easier to get another angle on it.
"Intellectual property" almost seems like a contradiction in terms. Like, I can't arrange the bits on my own computer hardware in a specific order because someone else arranged the bits on their own, separate computer in that order first? What?
Or better yet, ideas. I can't think things in my own brain, arguably the thing that is most obviously mine, and then talk about what I think about those things, because someone else thought them first and I didn't come up with them on my own? I get why it's not cool to pretend I did come up with them. It's cooler if I can remember where I heard them first and give credit for them. But if I don't remember? If I connect two ideas I heard about ten years apart only once I hear the second one and I can't remember where the first one came from? How did that idea not become "also mine" after being stored and then recalled from my own brain for ten years?
I don't know how to solve the admittedly hard problem of allowing people to profit from the hard work it takes to come up with original ideas. But the "intellectual property" concept doesn't make a lick of sense to me as the way to do it.
We could engorge the commons. If people are okay with mere access, then (for easy-to-distribute things, like books and videogames) free culture should naturally outcompete comparable proprietary works.
Promote DRM-free cultural artefacts. If you'd drop $70 on a AAA title, drop $70 on a DRM-free game you like, and then tell your friends about it. (Try-before-you-buy is a feature, not a bug, though don't be stingy about this if you can afford not to.)
This isn't generally-applicable, of course, but deconstructing the "everything is property" schema might make it easier to get another angle on it.