it takes time and energy and money to express your ideas in physical form
but it takes no effort or time or expense to share an idea on the internet
the creation of a physical object is a choke point that can be controlled: i can send 10,000 copies of a song from my home computer to anyone in the world, just by leaving a program running on my computer. but i can't publish and mail 10,000 copies of a song without considerable expense. therefore, "piracy" is a concept only a few could engage in in the pre-internet world, and ip law worked, because it was essentially a gentleman's agreement in an exclusive club of a few publishing companies. but in the internet world, piracy is simply the status quo, because its better, cheaper, and easier. you can't apply laws from a previous technological era on the behavior of tens of millions of teenagers around the world. so there's no enforcement possible, so the laws are defunct
in other words, talk all you want about patenting ideas. who cares? certainly not the teenager in slovakia who just violated your patent without knowing or caring anything about all those archaic legal structures that simply don't matter to him. and you have no recourse to make it matter to him. the era, and the laws derived from that era, is simply over, and you have to get used to it. the internet has rendered patents on ideas, and copyrights, as philosphically untenable concepts
the internet is disruptive technology. it will not be tamed by laws that depend upon the assumption that the production and distribution of media has choke points. instead, the laws will simply be ignored. look: the spanish came to the new world and rendered centuries old civilizations supporting the incan and aztec nobility extinct in a matter of weeks. was it fair to the previous era and the nobility who were invested in that structure to be so rudely toppled? who cares about continuity. who cares about fairness. its technological change: there's no stopping it.
talk all you want about ip laws: the only question is one of enforceability, and ip laws are unenforceable in the internet world. you merely have to adapt to the new world. a set of laws depending upon pre-internet assumptions going back to the invention of the printing press, about the economics of the distribution of media, are laws that simply don't matter any more
i'm not advocating for some far-out cybermarxist alternative fringe ideology that might work if everyone just started acting the way i think they should. what i'm doing is simply describing the already extensive reality of how things are already working in the real world, to people like you who seem to live in a pre-internet bubble of denial
