Say I pay a Valve employee a million dollars for the current working source-code of Half-Life 3. I then compile it and release the first couple working levels for $10 a pop... I should easily be able to make 50 million out of that exercise.
What protections would Valve have in your no-copyright, no-ip scenario?
I'm not anti-trade secrets. In your scenario, the source code to Half-Life 3 is a trade secret that the Valve employee is obligated to keep. However, if the code is ever made publicly available to read, it's no longer a secret and no money should be made from selling or licensing it. And even if the source is never public, once binaries are made public, it should be perfectly legal to reverse engineer those binaries.
In a no-copyright world, Valve's business model would certainly have to change, but your particular example would work mostly the same as it does now. The major difference is that you wouldn't be able to make 50 million dollars. Once those levels were released, people would be able to share them freely among themselves. Only the first person has to pay the $10, which means if you're willing to pay a million dollars for illegal access to secret source code, you should probably have a better plan for what to do with it. =P
> Once those levels were released, people would be able to share them freely among themselves
> In a no-copyright world, Valve's business model would certainly have to change
Yes it would have to change. Honestly I don't think you've thought this all the way through.
You need to show how companies like Apple, Microsoft, Valve and the thousands of smaller software makers (Adobe, Autodesk, Bethesda, Roxio, Zynga, IBM, Oracle, Blizzard, Symantec, Norton, SalesForce.com, Konami, Blackboard...) can still make as much money as they do today and have the same protections they have today.
If you can't well, then we may as well sit around discussing what the world would be like if there was no war, or what kind of tidal waves two moons would generate.
Say I pay a Valve employee a million dollars for the current working source-code of Half-Life 3. I then compile it and release the first couple working levels for $10 a pop... I should easily be able to make 50 million out of that exercise.
What protections would Valve have in your no-copyright, no-ip scenario?