People really need to shake themselves out of the clutches of this IP myth -- for that is what it essentially is. It is not even well-founded for an old, material-oriented industry, let alone for informational.

And you cannot invent something like the internet and not expect the economics of information-goods production to be eventually utterly transformed. It changes not only the kind of info produced, but how it is, and the ways consumers and producers can interact. So why keep looking backwards? We should be prompting, encouraging, or forcing companies to develop new ways to do things now.

Are we doing things the same way as before the industrial revolution? Is anyone really going to propose that by ditching old practices and adapting to the full capabilities of the greatest info tech in history we will see a drop in production? Does that really not sound ridiculous?