EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers
[I typed this up as a reply to a comment that has now been flagged. I think it's a conversation worth having, so I'm putting it at the top level instead.]
I'd argue that "intellectual property" is fundamentally different from physical property, and can't really be "stolen" per se.If I steal your car, I have a car and you don't have a car. If I "steal" your book, we both have the book. I'm better off, and you're no worse off. In an "ideal" society, the free sharing of knowledge would be not just allowed, but encouraged.I imagine there's been measurable harm to our society's cultural and scientific advancement because copyright forces us to recreate others' work instead of building off of it.But what does that world look like? Quite frankly, I'm not sure. Of course, we can't just abolish copyright with no replacement; it's certainly necessary to reward the creation of this work somehow.One thing I've thought about is a sort of "crowdfunded patronage" model, where the creator of a work declares upfront how much money they want to make off of it, and releases it into the public domain once they've received that much money.Another possibility is drastically reducing the term of copyright to 20 years or so. That'd still give 20 years to exploit the work—and I imagine most copyrighted works make most of their money in the first 20 years—while allowing others to reuse the work much more quickly.