Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
The Star Trek thing is pretty easy: they have no money so the rights (to physical property or intellectual property) become a redundancy. IP has only been defined as such in order to encourage more IP by supporting exploitation. With no money to use as incentive, they will have to find some other means. Reputation, perhaps? This phaser was brought to you by .... 
The problem with trying to mimic a $1000 bottle of wine is that it is self defeating. Typically a significant proportion of the price of a $1000 bottle of wine comes from its rarity value. If it is no longer rare the price will drop and your $20 wine will be a mimic of a $20 bottle of wine.
And yes, being cheap to reproduce is a real and relevant difference between IP and most other sorts of property (tangible and non-tangible) - for now, anyway. IP can be consumed without being used up. In theory this lack of scarcity should prevent it from being treated as a property, but in practice it hasn't turned out that way - or not so far.
It's rather circular, but I think IP is able to be treated as a property because it has been treated as property. Originally this was partly supported by the fact that reproduction of IP met with scarce resources (paper and time etc.), but having established itself as property IP is not moving over just because we found cheaper ways to reproduce it. |
In the late Start trek universe, is seems to me they had some form of money - I think was called bar lathium. (Pardon my memory, I'm not a Trekkie.)
Your point about IP being consumed without being used up is very important. It marks the critical difference between IP and PP. PP has value because it is consumed with it being used up. Should that fact not be a reason for treating IP differently from PP?