> I am not sure how we as a society would benefit from ditching IP notions.
Indirectly, by having a more consistent legal system. As I said, I believe pretty strongly in property rights, and I believe IP is inconsistent with property rights. Debate about either of those things is probably way off topic for the Arc Forum, even more so than it would be for Hacker News.
As for the rest of your arguments, they're all of the form "there are unfortunate consequences". I can take each one of them and argue that it wouldn't be as bad as you think--sometimes because it'd be bad for some people for a while, but people would adapt and we'd all probably be better off at the end of it--as is usually the case with technological revolutions. I could explain myself in more detail and give examples, and in fact I began to do so, but, again, this is probably not the place for such a debate. Suffice to say that I have reasons for my opinions; I've done a lot of reading, thinking, and arguing on the subject (with myself, with the things I read, and with friends); and in an extended debate, you'd probably concede that at least my reasoning made sense even if you didn't agree with some of my premises.
Well, I've stated my opinion, and beyond that, the matter has little practical importance. As I said, I'm inclined to respect people's wishes, and if I copy and paste anyone's code here, it's little trouble for me to copy and paste the text of the copyright and license or whatever as well. (It would only be a problem if you were using the GPL or something, which I believe is supposed to require me to release my entire project under the GPL.) And it certainly shouldn't be a problem when I give code to you guys.
It's fair to say this is not arc language topic, so I will try to not extend it. It really is an interesting topic. For the record, I am not against your ideas, I just not able to marry the ideas up to the results.
