I'm sure that many pundits will come out brandishing their own proposals to 'fix Copyright'. Here's an alternative idea: kill off the idea of intellectual property altoegether.
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.
Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it.
He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
This is about as meaningful a suggestion as "I think everyone should just get along and then we'd have world peace." It's not wrong, but it's so inapplicable to the world we live in that it might as well be wrong.
Copyright does not exist because it is thought to be natural — quite the opposite. Copyright exists because there is no natural property right to those things, but it is widely believed that granting authors some degree of ownership of their work serves the common good.
It is certainly true that it appears to be hard to get compensated for work that is not protected by copyright. Some might say that's all right, and people should just create things for the good of everyone else and they can mumblemumble to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads while they're creating — but that kind of "let them eat cake" attitude is unlikely to gain currency as long as people actually believe authors bring value into the world.
Incidentally, if we're actually talking about everything that's called "intellectual property" rather than just copyrights, your plan also means there will be nothing preventing me from, say, opening up a faux Apple store and selling knockoff Macs and iPhones that just run Gentoo with a crappy theme.
There's a significant difference between Copyrights (and Patents ... same argument, really) and trademarks. Passing off your knockoff Mac as an Apple product is actually a class of fraud, and should be treated as such. Selling something that just happens to look exactly like an Apple, but you clearly explain to the customer that it isn't? Go right ahead.
Re. mechanisms for paying authors and musicians (and other creatives) without Copyright or Patent law, take a look at that Molinari site. History is replete with examples.
Furthermore, even if your argument were correct, it still wouldn't justify the initiation of force inherent in Copyright and Patent law. That is, the desire of authors to earn a living from writing ought not to be sufficient cause for the State to coerce people into paying them for their writing.
The distinction between copyright and trademarks was my point. When you say "intellectual property," you're lumping together a bunch of things that aren't alike. (Also, if we do abolish all intellectual property, my crappy Gentoo computer with the aluminum case not only looks like an Apple iMac, it is an Apple iMac — just not the Apple iMac you're thinking of! Trademarks exist to prevent namespace collisions like this.)
As for the Molinari site, I looked at it, but it was very hard to find anything noteworthy in the wall of links with anchor text like "Copyright is murder," "The War on Copyright Nazism" and "On the Subject of Genocidal Rage." If you have a good piece in mind that argues against the historical utility of copyright, I would be interested to read it, because I've never seen such a thing.
And yeah, I think that there is a case for trademarks as distinct from other forms of IP. I think I'm on shaky ground here according to other market anarchists, but I think that trademarks serve a purpose of communication.
That is, that there is in reality a distinction between my 'iMac' and an iMac made by Apple, that trademarks exist to facilitate the communication of that distinction to customers, and that it's reasonable to deal with trademark infringement with force.
Of course, that opens an entirely new can of worms: what constitutes a trademark? The Apple logo? The shape of an iMac? The colour? Etc. etc.
'Intellectual Property' doesn't exist at all, people just like to group copyright, trademarks and patents into the same term despite the separate, drastically different sets of laws backing them.
Lewis Hyde's Common As Air is a good read on the framers' original intentions when it came to issues like this, and why our modern system is in violation of their original constitutional mandate. Personally enjoyed it more than his other well known work The Gift.
On the subject of the article, and as per Bradley Kuhn's analysis[1], it should be noted that the court did not consider the question of fair use in this case and a jury will be able to sit down and consider that can of worms going forward. Not the end of the world, considering.
I remember first hearing the story of Prometheus when I was in elementary school, and I thought it was very peculiar that he was being punished so cruelly[0] for "stealing", when really the gods were no worse off afterwards.
[0] Chained to a rock for all eternity[1], with his liver eaten daily by an eagle (his liver regenerated, as he was immortal)
If this continues, I will certainly be making it my policy to NEVER use any API unless it is permissively licensed under a widely-used license (specifically, 2-3 clause BSD, OSI MIT, GPL variants, or Apache 2).
If they want to play copyright games, then we as developers can force them to play the game by our rules (else we don't use their APIs).
http://praxeology.net/anticopyright.htm
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.
Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it.
He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
- Jefferson