Yeah, like I said elsewhere, the current system has problems - some of them serious - but I have yet to see anything that makes a lot of sense as a replacement. And yes, it's not a 100% "real" market, and thus the quotes - I didn't realize I'd need to spell it out. I thought it's obvious to anyone who studies this stuff that IP is only "property" due to laws and regulations, rather than some natural state of rivalrousness and excludability, like an automobile.
My best guess is that reconfiguring the current compromise in favor of consumers, rather than some producers (copyright extensions, etc...) might be the best course of action, but I am not convinced 100% of anything.
It is obvious that IP only exists thanks to governments, that's why it's odd to be complaining about Government intervention when all that is being proposed is a different kind of government intervention to correct market failures.
I copied the "quotes" on real because it applies to both solutions, in both cases you're creating some kind of market with the hope that it functions better than no market at all, or any alternative market.
The problem (or at least part of it) is that people, even those that have thought about it for a while, are too quick to accept the current IP mess as natural, unchangeable, morally correct and real, when it is none of those things.
I think the sort of IP market that existed prior to fast broadband and easily reproducible goods is a lot closer to a functioning market than wonky systems where all users of broadband are taxed and can 'spend' their taxes on things they don't consume, completely out of proportion to their actual costs to produce.
I'm not saying public subsidies should be off the table, just that this proposal and others I've seen don't seem to be as good as reforming the current system.
I think the type of market before IP protection when authors published serially and collected advances (e.g. Dostoyevsky, Dickens) was closer to a functioning market than the current system where authors, programmers, and pharmaceutical companies shoot their whole wads into the market and hope for a return on their sunk costs rather than attempting to actually sell their labor.
IP laws can be a net win for everyone. Let's leave the giants like MSFT be and use a simple example:
Dentist needs billing software. He's going to pay through the nose and face a free rider problem if he just pays some guy straight up to write it and release it under a liberal open source license. The software may not get written at all!
If, OTOH, the developer says he'll take a tenth of what it costs him to write it, and the dentist introduces him to 20 of his friends, the dentists all pay less than the labor costs, and the developer makes more money. And the software gets written.
Sure, simplified a lot, and ignoring various options, but you get the idea.
My best guess is that reconfiguring the current compromise in favor of consumers, rather than some producers (copyright extensions, etc...) might be the best course of action, but I am not convinced 100% of anything.