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In a future with draconian copyright enforcement, what I see is a whole lot less music and software. We won't even notice. It's not like we'll wake up and suddenly apps will be gone. We probably won't even be able to measure a decrease year-over-year in app production. What we'll never notice is that twice as many apps or ten times as many apps would have been created, or would have had much better quality, if we had a more reasonable legal framework and creators weren't terrified of being sued because their creation was "too similar" to something else or transformed or remixed previous work or used/re-implemented an API without permission or ...


What a lot of people seem to lose sight of is that IP is supposed to be a compromise - somewhere between producers and consumers. It gives producers temporary property rights on something that is not naturally rivalrous or excludable in order to give them an incentive to produce said goods.

These days, that compromise is, in some ways, probably tilted too far towards producers (or some categories of producers at least), but with no intellectual property at all, that would tilt things too far the other way.




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