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Originally Posted by DiapDealer
No is requiring you to pay for an idea. In fact, you're free to have the same "idea" as the author... anytime you want. You're only required to pay when you want to read about that idea in that authors words.
Would you pay money for a ticket to hear someone give a speech about the abolishment of copyright?
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No I would not, I would walk right through the door and sit in the front row. The information presented in such a speech would be beneficial the more it is heard, so I would be entitled to hear it, as would everyone else who wished to.
As to your first point, I suppose what it comes down to, at least when we are working within the copyright framework, is how do you define when an idea has been transformed from the purity of the idea itself into an expression of the individual?
I don't think we can define this, some might say we don't need to and will just blindly accept the terms of copyrights as is.
From what you are saying, it would seem that all ideas are already "out there" waiting to be expressed?
It might actually be instructive to think about the expression of ideas in prehistoric times, before the advent of writing.
If we had not switched over to a written medium for idea transmission and still relied on the spoken word for knowledge transfer, would utterances be copyrightable? Or more precisely would you believe their utterances to be copyrightable based on the jurisprudence of copyright law? (the jurisprudence of alter-oral history, not actual jurisprudence). I'm going to go ahead and say that you, in this (our actual) history would agree that outlawing speech especially speech outlawed for the sole purpose of wanting to restrict someone else from speaking, well that's just downright nutty.
Now, in this history (our actual again) we can just change the oral transmission of knowledge to a written form and see that outlawing the written word for the sole purpose of wanting to restrict someone else from writing is just as nutty.
By the way, the solution to price fluctuations is to not have a price at all. But I'm sure we already knew that.