> One answer is to say "they wouldn't!". From there, you have to ask: would they still create? Probably, yes, but in a much more limited way.

We're already limited by IP. The proposition of IP is that the best way to encourage people to engage in creative works is to prohibit them from engaging in creative works that involve other people's creative works.

That seems ridiculous at face value to me. That's not to say I think it's universally false - reality is often annoyingly counter-intuitive that way - but it only makes sense when there's a dearth of people able and willing to engage in creative pursuits, or when disseminating ideas and works is prohibitively expensive. Both of those conditions may have been true a century or even arguably two decades ago - but not today.

It does bring babies and bathwater to mind, though. In the name of encouraging creativity, we prohibit particular forms of creativity.

It'd be one thing if we had good reason to think that it continues to have its intended effect - but we don't. On the other hand, we have lots of examples of unintended, negative effects that inevitably come with trying to impedance-match a reality full of cheap technology that can quickly spread information with a system that attempts to limit access "for your own good".

> It seems fairly logical to me that without IP, you'd have fewer "IP goods",

True. Strictly speaking, I don't think there would be any "IP goods" per se, just technological goods. But I think most businesses wouldn't be affected much at all - I could see, for example, a software vendor like Oracle continuing to do almost exactly what it does today, indefinitely, even in the absence of IP. Well, sans a bunch of lawsuits.

(Not to get OT, but inevitably someone's gonna ask "what stops their customers from buying 1 license and deploying on 10,000 servers?" Nothing, or maybe some sort of DRM - but that's not the point. Ultimately, access to updates would be Oracle's "teeth" for discouraging that behavior among their customers. So they'd fire a good subset of the legal department, and instead hire more developers to write new features in order to retain customers. Sounds like more resources allocated to creative, productive work to me.)

> although having actual numbers to plug in, somehow, would doubtless improve the discussion a great deal.

This is the biggie. IP has been around much longer than the transistor, and given the enormous potential upsides, it seems obvious to me that we should have gone on an IP 'sabbatical' maybe 10 years ago, just to see what happens. After all, it's entirely possible that the overall creative output of our society wouldn't be affected at all, leaving "just" the advantage of ridding ourselves of one more legal labyrinth.

But the best case is much more exciting - what if creative output rises dramatically? I certainly don't think we can rule it out without giving it a shot.

And sure, there's a worst-case too; maybe every job related to IP simply disappears and we end up with a generation of college grads with no jobs. Fine, it can be undone. I'm not morally opposed to IP - well, I guess I do find it distasteful - but I'm definitely morally opposed to wrecking the economy. No one's suggesting we just say "screw the baby" if it turns out IP is a good thing.

But right now, we just don't know, and we should find out. On balance, it's absolutely worth trying - so why haven't we done it already? Not that I'm actually asking, we all know that there's a long and dreary list of mundane political and human-nature reasons why it hasn't happened, and won't be happening anytime soon.

But so it goes.