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Comment by dimasiks | Hacker News Reader

Not sure about this. To analyze the future of so many industries without IP law in a few sentences is asking for a bunch of angry comments. Take Movies, for example: I'm pretty sure I won't be going to movie theaters nearly as often if I could just stream HD to my gorgeous TV.

Software is also controversial. Google works by hiding their code in the datacenters, you can't just copy it. Microsoft works by compiling their code into binaries, and the only workable model for OSS has been support, which isn't very sexy/scalable business model.

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To be fair, Mises.org put their content empire under the creative common attribution, have PDFs for people to download for free, and at some point seek people with bit torrent expertise. They also managed to sell books at the same time.

They don't fight technological changes, they embrace it.

Realize that the LvMI didn't just go anti-IP in one day. It takes years of debate for them to change their mind about stuff. That's important, because you don't see major libertarian think tanks change their mind everyday. When they do change their mind, it probably mean that a lot of people change their mind.

Once you got people who have their mind changed, then they will do stuff like start business models not based on IP. That in turn could mean something improtant for the broader economy as a whole. It might mean intensified competition as the anti-IP people starts eating IP supporters' lunch.

There is a difference between IP and trade secrets. MS relies on IP, while Google relies on trade secrets.

IP is illegitimate because each concept exists in effectively infinite supply, and therefore cannot be owned anymore than the Pythagorean theorem or the color blue can be owned. _Access_ to a concept, however, can theoretically be owned, since access can only be gained through physical channels (books, bandwidth, oration, etc.), which are inherently limited in volume. Google limits the “supply” of _access_ to its code, while MS (tries to) limit the “supply” of the code itself.

So closed source could still exist in an IP-free world. There’d be nothing to stop people from distributing binaries freely, of course, but there’d also be nothing to stop anyone from concealing the source as a trade secret.

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