People with a conscience and an ounce of empathy will always value creative work if they themselves intend to make a profit with it in someway. If you take someone's work, and use it to make money, you should pay them for that work. Its really not that hard of a concept.

> If people can't make money without the government enforcing artificial scarcity of their output, they can always chose another business model.

Okay, but this literally goes for every single good ever. Case in point: theft. If theft wasn't "arbitrarily" made illegal, then there exists no business models for anything, ever. Because you could just steal it for free.

The idea behind IP is that IP is a good but an ephemeral one, one without a physical manifestation. So, we need to translate a type of theft that works for that.

Or, we could not. But keep in mind IP doesn't just mean music. It means, like... everything that isn't physical. Including my job, and probably your job too.

I think I've spend more on street music than any other music.

Imagine I put up a ghetto blaster and a hat. I play the finest music ever made. Would you put money in the hat? Would the idea to put money in the hat ever cross your mind? Would one even understand they want you to put money in the hat for playing the music?

Moreover, technological progress shouldn't be stifled by attempts to create artificial scarcity by technical means (read: DRM, war on general purpose computing, "The Right to Read", etc).

FOH with that Calvinist nonsense

May I ask what you do for a living?

I fully agree, but the vision is not practical unless you want to change the entire economy around the shift.

Yes, artists existed before IP but they also existed before the internet and digital works. Prior to the internet, creative works met real material limits and real scarcity due to the limitations of physical media. In the digital age, these limits are obliterated. You then have two options:

1. You instate something like IP to make digital markets roughly (and admittedly arbitrarily) like real material markets. 2. You establish no such system. No property rights exist in digital space.

I am a major fan of (2) myself, but history gave us (1). At this stage, too many people make a living off digital markets for us to just impose a radical shift—you're taking about reworking the entire global economy here. Without concomitant shifts toward socialism globally this would probably just result in digital space becoming sparse and people adopting "analog only" release models to try and sustain incomes off of creative work.

If you want to abolish IP, go the full mile and abolish the principle of property period. The distinction between IP and physical goods is just an accidental feature of digital technology. If you are against the idea of IP you are against property. Period. And I'm in full agreement, but I also don't think it's easy to achieve this at this historical juncture. Go read Proudhon.

You aren't thinking far along enough in your arguments.

If you abolish IP youtubers will not be able to make money because if I rip someone's monetized video and host my own ad-free copy, people will prefer to watch that and seeing as there is no legal claim over their IP, the youtuber has no recourse to get me to take down the video. There you go, I just divested a youtuber of a potential revenue stream.

This is why people who favor IP argue that it stimulates the creation of creative works. Look, whether we like it or not, everyone needs to earn wages in our system. If you can earn wages solely on creative works, you are empowered to spend more time and energy on those works because they give you a direct return. If the return on creative works becomes effectively zero modulo charity of consumers, you will have way less resources to devote since now you need to spend them making wages in other ways.

I am all for an IP free world, but I think it requires a fundamentally different economic reality from the one we currently have.