3) What's wrong with
treating assignments like property and setting up a market to buy and sell them?
There's plenty of precedent for this:
Mineral
rights, mining claims, Oil and gas leases, radio spectrum.
If a given
commodity is truly scarce, nothing works as good as the free market in
encouraging consumers to conserve and make the best use of it.
I think you're dead-on there, but you forget who you're
really trying to convince. It'll happen eventually but in the meantime the
greybeards who were largely responsible for the Internet as we know it (and
who by and large still wield significant influence if not still
stewardship) will be dragged there kicking and screaming from their
academic/pseudo-Marxist ideals, some of whom seem to still resent the
commercialization of the Internet. It's also hard to see the faults in the
system when you are insulated by your position as member of the
politburo.
The flip side of the coin of course is that if you let the
free market reign on IP's, you may price developing countries right off the
Internet which I don't think anyone sees as a desirable outcome. There's
sure to be a happy middle ground that people smarter than I will figure out, and
maybe it takes a silly lawsuit such as this to kick things
off.
Andrew
Cruse