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Wow. If everyone could copy whatever car they wanted for free, that would be a good thing. Since everyone would already have a car, car salesmen would go out of business. That's exactly what should happen.


Again, you are not looking at the big picture.

If you physically stole cars but left the complete per-unit cost in cash there, then you wouldn't have done anything wrong, right? Alternatively, you have a machine that makes perfect copies. Both work the same for this purpose.

Because you only focus on the per-unit cost. But even cars have fixed, one-time R&D costs that are distributed on each sold car totally arbitrarily just as the fixed costs for producing digital goods area distributed totally arbitrarily on each download/CD/whatever. The only difference is that digital goods have virtually no per unit-costs to go along with it. Still, in both cases, you need frameworks to reward creative/R&D work if you want it to happen (especially in a competitive way).

If you copy all music and all cars, then everybody has a car and music, but what is the incentive to produce better cars and new music later? That is the big picture.


Yes. Cars do have fixed one-time R&D costs. If you can freely copy all cars, the incentive to design/produce a better car would then have to be something other than money. As an example, Greenpeace might want to cut vehicle emissions in half, so they'd research and develop a way to do it.




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