“Throughout history, the countries that do the best job strengthening property rights– within reason– end up with the most prosperity.”

Now I already knew that your grasp of history is spotty at best and made up at worst. This is a beautiful example of made up. Copyright, as originally envisioned, was a response to the invention of the movable type press and the explosion of books that followed. (Note, no copyright at that point.) Nor did it have much of anything to do with author’s rights it was put in place for publishers who were busy bankrupting themselves when the Statue of Anne was passed. Of course, you’re free to make history up if you like but please, please stop passing it off here as fact.

Onto IP, whose altar you worship at. As there was no copyright at the time would you be so kind as to explain the outbreak of invention, creation and authorship of the Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Hebrews, Persians, peoples of the Indian subcontinent and, most importantly, Chinese when Intellectual Property laws didn’t exist. And the continued advances in all areas by the Byzantines and Arabs after the fall of the western Roman Empire based in Rome and the “Dark Ages” which followed. All these were quite prosperous.

(There were more but Mike would kill me if I outlined it all globally.)

And since when did the RIAA, as an organization share development costs of artists or technology during its existence. Outside of their dreams and too much reading and believing their own propaganda. I’ll give the MPAA some credit for forcing technological change early on. Most of that, incidentally, by ignoring or willfully violating patents and copyrights.

“why don’t you go to Somalia and see how all of that freedom to innovate is working out there.” I’m going to make the silly assumption that you do realize there’s a genocidal civil war going on there which doesn’t exactly encourage innovation in anything but coming up with better and deadlier small arms and explosives.

As long as you take pot shots at the British Library and British Museum I’m also going to make the idiotic assumption that you know the Smithsonian in Washington DC also “nicked” stuff back in the day when that was acceptable. And that there’s this monument in the US Capital that was “nicked” from Egypt without asking permission or paying for it.

The worst thing is that “fair use” or “fair dealing” has nothing what all to do with “nicking” content. But you’re more than happy to adopt the IP extremist view that it does. Creators still get paid — that is if you view publishers, record companies and today’s movie companies as creators rather than what they really are which is marketers. Some damned good at it.

Publishers are born and they die every day. Paper based ones are having a hard time of it now because people, it seems, would rather read ebooks or on line. Go figure, eh? Gotta be piracy, I guess.

You are right on one score. Content will be created just as it was before copyright existed. Invention will continue just as it did before patents existed. At periods it will explode just as it did before the legal framework around copyright and patent law existed.

I’d advise that you get stuffed though I know you already stuffed full of something. I just don’t want to know what it is because it still reeks.