Intellectual Property, and more

I hope you have fun reading this unfocused post. Just promise me to stay civil in the comments.

(1)
There must be some incentive for the writer to write a book. This incentive should scale with the social value of the book. This value, right now, with the help of copyright laws, is determined via a market system and the incentive we use is money. And that's a great way to do it.

Now, this system, unfortunately, is not easy to extend to the internet. As a consequence we need to discuss how we do it. But in this discussion we need to remember what we actually want:
To give the author an incentive to write the book. No more. We don't want him to earn millions and thus gain the right to buy everything an average citizen creates in a lifetime with the writing of one single book; or even the performance of a single song. If the incentive is high enough for him to write the book, it is high enough.

(2)
Now, there are two competing pictures to this discussion: In the one picture the market, the government and the restrictions the government creates, should be used to create a world as fair and as prosperous as possible. In this picture the markets, free contracting, laws and regulations are just means to an end. We use (and sometimes create) markets where they are useful and regulate them as much as necessary (and no more!) so that they work well and are helpful in creating a world as fair and as prosperous as possible.

The competing picture is this: A world in which everybody is free to subscribe or not subscribe a contract. This contract is then enforced by the government. If this creates a measure of unfairness or non-prosperity we don't really care because everybody is free to not subscribe a contract and this 'inherent fairness' is something we value more than equal chances to live the american dream (which is a global dream).

The main difference between the pictures, in my opinion, is that supporters of the first ask "In what world would we like to live and how to create it in a smart way without unwanted side effects".
While supporters of the other pictures like the 'inherent fairness' of “free contracting” and if this leads to massive inequality or social unrest or people starving in the streets or a large amount of people who don't experience prosperity, then that's just the price society has to pay for the 'inherent fairness'.

(3)
The pictures are closely related to two other pictures: The one is often called progressive (“let's boldly try to make the world a better place”). The other picture is often called conservative (careful: change can have unwanted side effects!)

Both pictures are important:
One must not ignore side effects. Caution is necessary - especially too much government can be a problem as it always brings with it the danger of corruption - which makes a few people rich at the expense of the rest.
But at the same time one shouldn't be afraid of trying to change the world we live in to be more prosperous and more fair. And this requires us to say out loud in what world we would like to live and then use tools like a free market and free contracting and government regulation to help create this world.

We should be careful but not afraid.