I remain convinced that coming up with a fair and practical method for dealing with intellectual property is the most important question of the age.
For the majority of human (art) history, no such concept existed. Ideas were communal (for instance see Bach's famous "Goldberg Variations", which borrowed a lot from popular songs of the time). In what sense is an intangible idea property at all? In what sense do I "own" a riff if I randomly strum it out one day on my guitar? It didn't create it. It existed prior to me playing it.
It has been shown the monetary incentive is not required for great things to be produced. Projects like wikipedia are testament to this, as is the immensity of excellent fiction, music and other art that is available for free on the internet.
The concept of Intellectual Property is outdated, and the world needs to realise this as it adapts to deal with the incredible implications of the developing internet.
Intellectual property isn't something the entertainment industry invented. It's something every six year old independently invents when telling her younger brother to stop being such a copycat. Creating is hard, copying is easy, and making the two equal is not fair.
Nor is the problem limited to art. Engineering design is currently sheltered from the problem by manufacturing, just like music used to be sheltered by physical media. When we can download cars, that won't be true anymore. If you think the argument over what you can do with an MP3 is ugly, just wait until we're arguing about printable handguns, airplanes, medicines, and combine harvesters.
I'm firmly convinced that that future is coming. Not quickly; some manufacturing processes will take centuries to replace, and some may never be replaced. But such a world does seem to get steadily closer with each passing year.
We need to figure out a practical and fair way to deal with information BEFORE it gets here.
Have you considered that you are not paying for materials when buying a car, but also for R&D?
2. I was reply to someone who was talking about intellectual property as a concept. Thus, I was engaging in discussion with him, not with the thread in a more general sense.
What bothers me is that the whole issue is always reduced to the most vulnerable example, which happens to be music. But there is no reason for why the role of IP should be the same for music as it is for movies, or games, or cars, or ... - even copyrights and patents work in different ways.
To name one notable difference, great music can be produced on a hobbyist budget by a single person nowadays, and often is. The R&D that goes into cars cannot. Yet, the results of millions of dollars of R&D are just as "always existent" as an MP3 of Lady Gaga is, so by your logic must not be protected.
The interesting question is, then how do we fund it? What is the incentive for any car company to waste money on crash tests if people will copy their car as soon as they have a matching 3D scanner?
I believe there are four hard truths about information that any solution must address:
(A) Copying is easy, and will continue to get easier. This is the essential to nature of information, and fighting it is not practical.
(B) Creating is hard, and will always be hard. Failing to recognize and compensate creators is not fair.
(C) Creating by improving on a copy is more than just an effective way to create. It is essential to the nature of creativity. Fighting this effect is not practical.
(D) Creative contributions are not additive. Determining the exact value of any one creator's contribution to a project is not practical.
Copyright as a concept fails hard on (A) and (C). I think licensing doesn't handle (D) very well. Fully open solutions have varying problems with (B). The best solution I can think of is academia's system of tenure and elaborate recognition -- and even there, the system's failure on (B) pushes people to resort to secrecy, which damages (C).
I don't have a good answer. I haven't even heard a good answer. I even think it's likely that the best answer will be many answers -- secrecy here, censorship there, openness here, copyright there, depending on the field. But I do know the problem will get a lot harder when the objects in question are not merely valuable for entertainment, but might be highly valuable for survival, highly expensive to produce, and dangerous or even potentially criminal.