I'll just recycle my comment I made on the PG's article:
PG seems to be advocating a pragmatic approach, based on the difficulty of enforcement. Goods can be excludable or non-excludable. Excludable goods are anything that can be effectively locked down (like most physical goods, or movie tickets). Non-excludable goods can't (like air, fish in the sea, and IP). You can make a non-excludable good excludable by creating laws (like Carbon Taxes or IP laws), but it's not always practical.
But he kind of misses the other half - rivalry.
Goods can also be rivalrous or non-rivalrous. Ideas are non-rivalrous as you don't lose anything (except a competitive advantage) if other people also have it. In fact, IP may be the opposite to rivalrous (which is a rare enough thing to not have a name, though I like the name "network goods"), because it's worth more if everyone has it. If more people can speak a language, it's more useful to everyone. The Lord of the Rings is more interesting if you can talk to your friends about it.
While there's a good reason to try to make common goods (rivalrous but non-excludable) goods more excludable (by introducing laws which prevent over-exploitation), it's perverse to make non-rivalrous excludable. You don't tax breathing if there's plenty of air.
The main reason you want to make a public (non-rivalrous non-excludable) good more excludable is to incentize its creation (another reason might be because it's judged to be a "de-merit" (bad) good - such as a porn or a method of manufacturing weapons). But since IP is an input to creating IP, there's very good reasons why you want to make copyright and patents expire in a short time - bringing down the cost of creating new IP may outweigh the lost incentive. Also, the anti-rivalrous nature of IP may even encourage people to make more, simply because it's so useful have more people using it - Linus got his own private kernel debugged and extended at a lower cost by sharing it.
If a good cannot be easily made excludable, then it's all very sad (assuming that the lost incentive to create more of it outweights the loss from more people having access to the existing stuff, and the stuff that's made voluntarily) but there's not much you can do without heavy regulation.
Music will still be made. Musicians will make money on gigs. Advertisers will pay musicians for annoying jingles. It's not the 1700s, there's literally millions of talented musicians who will eke out a living actually connecting with the community (concerts, teaching, playing in pubs) who should be able to produce far more (in aggregate) than Mozart, Beethoven and the like. Without copyright, many of those musicians may make a better living, as they can draw on other people's material more easily.
The fat distribution pipe (distributors, promoters, producers, broadcasters) will mostly die, but no-one really cares - they don't create much value. OK, the definition of value is rubbery, but if you make money by convincing people that they need something (i.e. tell them that folk music is daggy, and you have to buy the latest pop hit to be cool) then you're really destroying value, then offering a band-aid.
PG seems to be advocating a pragmatic approach, based on the difficulty of enforcement. Goods can be excludable or non-excludable. Excludable goods are anything that can be effectively locked down (like most physical goods, or movie tickets). Non-excludable goods can't (like air, fish in the sea, and IP). You can make a non-excludable good excludable by creating laws (like Carbon Taxes or IP laws), but it's not always practical.
But he kind of misses the other half - rivalry.
Goods can also be rivalrous or non-rivalrous. Ideas are non-rivalrous as you don't lose anything (except a competitive advantage) if other people also have it. In fact, IP may be the opposite to rivalrous (which is a rare enough thing to not have a name, though I like the name "network goods"), because it's worth more if everyone has it. If more people can speak a language, it's more useful to everyone. The Lord of the Rings is more interesting if you can talk to your friends about it.
While there's a good reason to try to make common goods (rivalrous but non-excludable) goods more excludable (by introducing laws which prevent over-exploitation), it's perverse to make non-rivalrous excludable. You don't tax breathing if there's plenty of air.
The main reason you want to make a public (non-rivalrous non-excludable) good more excludable is to incentize its creation (another reason might be because it's judged to be a "de-merit" (bad) good - such as a porn or a method of manufacturing weapons). But since IP is an input to creating IP, there's very good reasons why you want to make copyright and patents expire in a short time - bringing down the cost of creating new IP may outweigh the lost incentive. Also, the anti-rivalrous nature of IP may even encourage people to make more, simply because it's so useful have more people using it - Linus got his own private kernel debugged and extended at a lower cost by sharing it.
If a good cannot be easily made excludable, then it's all very sad (assuming that the lost incentive to create more of it outweights the loss from more people having access to the existing stuff, and the stuff that's made voluntarily) but there's not much you can do without heavy regulation.
Music will still be made. Musicians will make money on gigs. Advertisers will pay musicians for annoying jingles. It's not the 1700s, there's literally millions of talented musicians who will eke out a living actually connecting with the community (concerts, teaching, playing in pubs) who should be able to produce far more (in aggregate) than Mozart, Beethoven and the like. Without copyright, many of those musicians may make a better living, as they can draw on other people's material more easily.
The fat distribution pipe (distributors, promoters, producers, broadcasters) will mostly die, but no-one really cares - they don't create much value. OK, the definition of value is rubbery, but if you make money by convincing people that they need something (i.e. tell them that folk music is daggy, and you have to buy the latest pop hit to be cool) then you're really destroying value, then offering a band-aid.