Just briefly : The free sharing of knowledge is one of the few ways in which we can significantly raise the standards of living of hundreds of millions of people without their unduly consuming additional non-renewable resources. In a world running out of energy and other resources, it is therefore ridiculous to unnecessarily perpetute any law which prevents the free flow of knowledge to anyone has the physical means (i.e. computers and the Internet) to gain access to that knowledge.

Of course we need to find the means to fairly remunerate those who have created that knowledge. I would suggest that this would pose no insurmountable technical difficulty. We could, with relative ease, track how often any particular piece of knowledge (software, music, moving, chemical formula, part design etc.) were accessed.

Broadly it would work like this:

A common pool of funds, sufficient to adequately and fairly remunerate all the creators of knowledge, could be raised, possibly through taxation. The money could then be distributed according to how popular each item of created knowledge was. It would not be a linear formula. Perhaps it would be something logarithmic or something based on the square root function. The more often an item was downloaded, the more the creator would receive, but the (micro)payment for each download would decrease as the number of downloads increased.

So, there would be a reasonable incentive to create quality knowledge, but the distribution of remuneration would not be too unequal.

Of course there are many technical, political and economic issues to be solved here, but the complexity of such a system need not be anywhere near as complex as today's current international IP system.

(ToBeContinued)

(Continued from earlier post)

The fantastic success of open source software (Linux, Apache, all Internet protocols etc, etc) is surely demonstration that there are plenty of very clever and skilled people in this field, and probably many other fields, who would be willing to take part in such a system. The argument that truly gifted people would take part in a system of remuneration, such as the current system in which the free flow of knowledge is restricted seems to be nonsense. In any case, how many of them happily make use of software and other knowledge, freely given by others to them and the rest of the world?