I don't want my work to be copied and people to 'take advantage' of me....Someone cure my CD?

Well, ultimately only you can cure you, but I'll suggest some points to ponder.
This idea that people copying your work somehow takes advantage of you is a concept sold to us by middle-men without talents of their own. They successfully marketed the idea that people owed you compensation if they had thoughts inspired by your thoughts. They successfully created a sense of entitlement in the common person; a sense that if someone is able to make use of one of your ideas that they owed you compensation.
. But this isn't true, and isn't possible in practice. Generically, all human knowledge is built on that which came before and it is the ability to build on other works or combine works in new ways that allows for progress. All people share ideas daily with others, and do so without compensation. And this is natural, and how we have evolved for thousands of years. Taken to it's logical conclusion, telling someone to go to the movies is "your idea" and if they make use of it, they owe you compensation. That is absurd, and hence ultimately unworkable. So we try and make artificial boundaries; laws where some actions/ideas are "protected" and other are not. And these laws are then arbitrarily applied to different scenarios by judges. The resulting mess is what we call IP today. And it's not going to get better until it is abandoned.
Ultimately this is a business model question: is monopoly protection the best way to generate ideas? In economics, a monopoly is (universally?) a bad idea. Monopoly leads to monopoly rents, with less incentive to innovate. What monopoly rents are good for is the profits of those that hold the monopoly rights.

So, in answer to your question I would suggest that you worry less about people copying your work, and concentrate on how you can take advantage of the free copying to make you money. In no version of the foreseeable future will it get harder to copy digital or digitizable works - (in fact with 3d printers coming, this will extend to physical goods...) -- so any attempt to make money by restricting copying is a losing battle.

One of the best blogs on this topic. It is a must-read for anyone interested in making money via abundance instead of artificial scarcity.

Net Neutrality is a bit of a red-herring: as long as the last-mile is owned by the retailer there will never be competition in the market.
With true competition there would be no need to discuss net neutrality as those that offered unimpeded access to the web would be the ones people would use. More specifically, there would always be a competitor who offered up neutral access for those of us who cared.
Like streets, communication access is a natural monopoly (oligopoly at best) and should be either directly state owned (like our streets) or set up as a non-profit stand-alone with a mandate to maintain and upgrade the wires. Retailers would then connect and be charged for connection + (time-of-day?) bandwidth. Retailers would be free to make price plans as they see fit.
Fighting for net neutrality is working on symptom and failing to cure the problem.

Want a free/libre internet? Take back control of the last mile.

The whole point behind patents is to encourage innovation by granting an inventor time-limited monopolies on their ideas so long as they teach their invention to the world.

While that may have been part of the original sales-pitch for patents, it fails in the real world. This is largely due to Treble Damages from a purely legal stance, but in many shops there is a Not Invented Here syndrome that reduces the likelihood that anyone will look for techniques to do anything in the patent library.

I am not aware of anyone using existing patents for the purposes of innovating or problem solving. Anyone care to chime in on an instance where the engineers at their company read patents for the purposes of learning? All I have heard is lawyers asking engineers to read them. And this seems to be only to either engineer around a known patent, or to prove that their product somehow doesn't infringe on a patent.
Anyone?
Bueller?

But you have to realize that this will severely affect R&D if it's your own fault that you failed to improve past what you just innovated.

I'm sorry, that is the patent lie: companies will innovate because if they don't they'll fail in the market. In all of history it is only the incumbents who lobby for protection. The new innovators (potentially tomorrow's incumbents) innovate because they want to bring a product to market. Progress is always made on the innovations that came before.

I'm not arguing for or against patents and I'm not arguing to lengthen or shorten the time they are in effect. What I'm trying to do is get you to understand the repercussions of doing any of the above.

I wasn't going to respond until I read this line. Coupled with your other statement I can't read this any other way then an endorsement of the patent system.

and responsible IP laws are a good thing.

ah, there it is. Not sure why you hid your bias in the middle there...

Until autonomous vehicles prove superior safety and insurers and/or legislators recognize the new state of affairs

Far more likely is that we will still pay insurance to allow the vehicle on the public road. The sale will include a disclaimer of liability and an agreement from the purchaser that they will buy insurance to drive it on the public road. We will all sign it, and continue to buy insurance. The combined interest of the car manufacturer and the insurance company won't let this go any other way.

X per month is simple and a good idea for most customers, X per gigabyte is simple and a good idea for most ISPs.

ISPs like "x-per-month" because they can claim to sell you 100gb knowing you will only use 10gb. On a per-gig charge you would only pay for what you use.
Bandwidth should be charged more like electricity: you pay for what you use when you use it. It's not like the unused time can be saved for the busy period.
Of course, all of this is predicated on actual competition to keep the 'per-gig' charge from being obscene...
Ultimately the 'last-mile' should be socialised (like roads) and then you have choice of providers to connect to. As with roads there is a natural monopoly (or at best oligopoly) in laying wires to homes and businesses. We will never have true competition as long as the retailers own the last mile.

I'm not sure it's possible to come up with an alternative pricing system that doesn't end up as an even more unfair black box model where you only find out how much you've spent when the bill comes.

The true cost of moving bits on the 'net has dropped dramatically over the last decade. It should cost pennies per gig, and in a pay-per-gig model that reflected the true cost of this service it wouldn't matter much if you used 100gig or 200gig. Furthermore, there is no reason why you could not track your usage in real-time for people who wanted to know where they were at. Finally you could limit your maximum possible cost by limiting your speed.

Your vehicle isn't a useless lump of metal and plastic if your GPS unit fails

That depends on who's driving

because you would need more money controlling and monitoring traffic (effectively) than any money you profit off of media

Tho I agree with your post the problem is that they won't be spending their own money to monitor the 'net. They have already co-opted law enforcement to go after digital pirates and they want the ISPs to bear the cost of monitoring.
So ultimately all these costs of monitoring and enforcement are then born by us, but the profits remain theirs.

That leads to bribes/threats

I was in agreement with this, but I'm no longer as convinced this is a problem that needs to be solved.
With my cell-phone camera I can already take a picture of my vote for proof to someone else so the problem (if there is one) would already exist today; or would be becoming an issue as more and more people have the ability.
If it does become a problem then we would simply needs to alter the proof function to allow for the user to ask for one of three responses w/o anyone else knowing which way they asked the question:
1. The vote they actually cast
2. Always Yes
3. Always No

At least with a traditional methodology, everything is reviewed for feasibility and risks before you invest too much time driving down the wrong path.

With many (most?) software projects over budget, late and n% (where n is between 5%-115%) software projects outright failing I don't see how that can be true.

Ultimately I think I'm largely in agreement with many people here who assert that software development is actually very difficult to do successfully; I'd just add that it's also very easy to do poorly, pays reasonably well and it is difficult for non-technical people (like hiring managers) to evaluate who will actually do it well. This combination makes success an unlikely outcome.

I don't think we'll ever have completely automated cars.

Fully automated cars are inevitable.
We can debate how they will come about/be implemented (1), how long it will take(2), how they will work(3), if there will be insurance requirements and who would pay it(4), but their arrival is guaranteed.

...by human error or by a malfunctioning computer.

Cars today are already almost 100% computerized. The controls you touch tell a processor what servos to enact.

...will make it feel like playing a slot machine.

I'm not planning on letting M$ build these things...but even if Sync eventually Borgs it's way into car control (instead of feature control) I just won't buy that one ...

Ultimately most driving is monotonous work that requires constant attention. Humans suck at that sort of activity; machines excel at that sort of activity.

My guesses
(1) Incremental: First increment is here: cars that park themselves, lane departure warnings, etc. Next increments like "Sixth Day" where on the highway it was automated and in the city there was manual control. Farm equipment will be an early adopter; trucks and buses will lead on the road.
(2) Well, partly automated is here, and I suggested that the children being born today would be the last full generation that drove themselves. The next generation will be the crossover. Of course I said this two years ago and that is starting to look pessimistic.
(3) Sensors. Lots of Sensors. As a child I thought we would need a "wire" in the road to tell the car where it was but that seems silly now.
(4) Insurance will continue much as it does today, there will be an annual fee paid by the driver based on the risk of their vehicle; don't worry, the insurance and car companies aren't going to kill their golden goose.

It is worth remembering though that the open source movement depends on copyright laws.

How does BSD depend on copyright?
I'd still suggest that at most the Publishing/Distribution industries need some sort of monopoly protection. And they are simply discovering that the service they offer has been replaced by the Internet.
The sooner the notion of creating artificial scarcity goes away the better off we will all* be.

*ok, except the now mostly redundant distribution companies... but they'll get over it.

Actually the losses suffered by the copyright owner through people using illegal copies are quite real. This is because some of the people playing illegally copied games are doing so instead of buying a legitimate copy for themselves.

I'm sorry, that is false. You're missing an essential component of the equation. And I can't include people who would not have paid 100% as there is no mechanism for paying anything other than 100%: in the absence of an illegal copy those people would have done without and are therefore 0% loss. Ferrari isn't losing any sales to me.

The correct calculation would be: Delta (not loss!) = "Nbr of People who bought for some illegal copy related reason" - "Nbr of people who would have paid 100%, but illegally copied it instead"
This number could be positive (ie; 'illegal' sharing causes an increase in sales) as can be seen here.

From how I've always seen the numbers, there is (always?) a positive correlation between sharing and sales. While there will be argument about causation I would suggest that (at least) in the above example there is clear cause and effect.

Of course ultimately this is a business model question: Can we get content w/o charging on a per-copy basis. While it is easy to say that we had creative expression predating copyright; others reply that it was a different era. To those, I would suggest that the open source movement is a strong indicator that even today there are other ways for creative efforts to be compensated without the need for per copy charges.
Once that is resolved the rest of the discussion becomes somewhat moot.

ok "t connor s", I can see you have some kind of bias against The Machines, but the rest of us are still pretty happy with the progress we're making.

This is why need to scrap the entire tax code and replace it a federal sales tax.

I'd suggest The One Tax should be Property Tax.

Anything that is artificially expensive generates a black market for the same thing at it's "true" cost.
For example, income tax creates a black-market for labour: People start to do work for cash to avoid paying the taxes.
Here in Canada we have significant alcohol and tobacco taxes which creates significant smuggling from the US.
Furthermore, anything which you add a tax to you discourage (obviously anything you subsidize you encourage...)
So since we live in a consumer-based economy, the last thing you want to do is discourage people from buying things.
And if you tax income/revenue then you start to have corporations that move their revenue to the lowest rated region.
This "black market" effect is one reason we so many kinds of taxes: the more you raise one type, the more of that activity moves under ground, the less tax revenue you generate. It has always been a balancing act; trying to find a tax rate where most people don't bother to work in the underground economy and choose instead to contribute to the tax base.

But none of this applies to physical property, aka: Land.
Everyone needs somewhere to live, work etc.
Every contributing member of our society needs land on which to exist. This is true whether person or corporation.
While corporations might look to minimize their physical presence, it is really difficult to effectively do business in another country if you have no physical presence there.
So that means that everybody pays.

Another possible fringe benefits might include more virtual-type offices, reducing travel (reducing energy consumption, pollution, congestion, etc)