> Incorporated IP, which will lead to fragmentation of
> existing corporate models, will become the glue that holds the various
> decentralized collaborative networks all together. Thus any new IP becomes
> the nucleus of a potential new decentralized distributed organization.

Hogwash. The glue that holds decentralized networks together is, by
design, baling wire and twine.

Intellectual property matters because it's one of the few controllable
bottlenecks in a decentralized network. It is the digital equivalent of a
good harbor or a navigable inland waterway -- a scarce and valuable
natural resource that allows money and power to accumulate.

Now, IP is not actually a natural resource. IP advocates claim that there
it doesn't matter whether the source of scarcity is natural or artificial,
as long as you have enough scarcity to allow economies to form around it.
Scarcity drives economies, economies drive prosperity, prosperity enables
happiness. In this view, utopia is the worst thing that could happen.

On the other side there's a nest of utopians, Ian Clarke foremost,
claiming that prosperity matters less than freedom. In this worldview,
political liberty comes before wealth. A well-fed population is a
disaster if it comes from dictatorship.

I don't agree with him, and I don't agree with the dystopians. Political
freedom matters because it is the best way to feed the population. The
fact that deliberate monopolies can allow wealth to form is a good thing.
The fact that deliberate monopolies can enable the powerful to block
worthy competition is a bad thing. If and only if intellectual property
leads to extortion, it's bad, and it should only be allowed if there
is a framework to limit its power. That's why patents and copyrights in
the US were created as a _limited_ monopoly.

The case against intellectual property is not that wealth is less
important that freedom. It is that it is not possible to grant limited
monopolies, and hence the government should not be in the business of
granting unlimited ones.

Why isn't it possible to grant limited monopolies? Because they create
wealth that is used to lobby the government for less-limited monopolies,
which creates more wealth, which is used to lobby the government for even
less limited monopolies. This is the story of IP in the US: every term
extension has led to another term extension. Now, there may be a tipping
point below which IP is not valuable enough to generate the lobbying
dollars to lead to a complete metastizing, and this is more or less what
you see in US history. It took a long time to get to the first term
extension, not quite so long to get to the second, and so on, with treats
for IP holders steadily accelerating. It is _acceleration_ that matters.

The government creates intellectual property. The proceeds are used to
influence the government to create more. Etc. The key problem is that
intellectual property corrupts.

- Lucas