Thanks for replying.
Allow me to comment on a few things.
"The concept of property just is artificial in general."
All ideas and concepts are artificial in a way, however the concepts of property are based on an inescapable property of things
to be scarce. It has very little to do with selfishness and greed, but more with organization. Even if everyone is not greedy,
you still have got to outline what part of land are you using and what part is your neighbour using.
So this is what I mean by saying it is founded on a non-artificial situation.
"In a capitalistic society, it should be possible to earn money by
investing your time and effort in producing things people need/want.
People being paid for their time and effort directly may be preferable.
There's still a need/use for copyright to protect the outcome, to allow
the investment to be made beforehand. This way, payment can depend on
the quality of the outcome."
So basically what you are saying is that in your view copyright is something that will motivate people to create things and that without
it people are less likely to do things. And we go back to the same argument I pointed to earlier.
It is not a bad argument in itself as long as we speak about work for hire. Culture is a different phenomena which cannot be limited to a collection of works for hire. This is why I do not believe this argument works when we speak about culture.
Does it work when we speak about a caste of professional creative people? It does, definitely. But is the caste of professional creative people so desirable to society? This is another question we can discuss.
"Oh, and in a funny twist, the GPL and similar licenses provide a reason
for copyright on immaterial goods, as they have well founded objectives
and copyright is the legal mechanism they rely on to be enforceable."
They are useful only in the context of the copyright law. Please note that in the absence of copyright law as a government enforced monopoly proprietary software on a larger scale is less attractive. So in a free society with no government intervention I would argue proprietary code would be a rarity.
What do you think?
--
Louigi Verona
http://www.louigiverona.ru/