Bitter Irony These categories are, of course, bitterly ironic for all of the true little-guy innovators out there. The Napster case is another bitter irony, considering that the intellectual property profits are massively accrued by major corporations, not individual artists and innovators. In the classic model of a few hundred years ago, the assumption behind intellectual property law was that there would be a handful of innovators, surrounded by hordes of mindless consumers of such information-based products. The assumption behind the model is that there are innovators who are not consumers, and consumers who are not innovators. That is, it is assumed that consumers will never be information-producing agents themselves.
Innovation is presumed to be the exclusive domain of a handful of lofty thinkers.
It is only for them that the need to legislate a governmentally-backed patent or copyright regime exists. The reason is simple. In an information economy, millions of potential innovators exist. That means that most knowledge and advancement are produced by building on the foundation and improving upon the basis of previous work. This is far different from music, for example, where a new song ought to sound distinct from an older one.