Incentives are Free
Healthy human beings are inherently creative. We do not need government enforced monopolies to create. Matt Asay probably wrote his essay for free, and would not have a forum to publish it without a free and unencumbered internet.
My United States was founded on piracy. Some of our English founders were literal pirates, robbing Spanish and French merchant ships. The printers of Benjamin Franklin's Philadelphia stole galleys of books in London, and printed them in the colonies first. Franklin used his printing wealth to fund scientific discovery - his "open source" lightning rod impressed the French court enough to fund the American Revolution. We built U.S. industry by awarding temporary patents to craftsmen immigrants who divulged European guild secrets. And we used that industry, and a flood of European immigrants to the North, to smash Southern slavery, "stealing" the human chattel property of faux aristocrats and making slaves into free citizens. The job is by no means complete, but on the whole we've made progress, and will make more with the generous participation of minds around the world.
We invent, and write, and dance, and sing, because that is what free people do. Those who would constrain, channel, thwart, and punish the creativity of a whole planet to benefit a few cocaine-snorting fat cats in Hollywood deserve to have their pet legislation (and legislators) squashed into wet smears. If they persist, we'll do to their studios what Sherman did to Atlanta.
The revolution WILL be televised - on YouTube.
Full disclosure - my name is on 12 patents worldwide. Patents do not work as claimed.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
