Better Than Free

Subscribe now In the analog world, it takes great effort to make a copy. That friction worked as a constraint to limit the propagation of copies. If you wrote a book, or developed a photograph, or carved a statue, it took trouble to reproduce it. We invented a legal system whereby we would reward the creator of the book, or the photo, or the art, or the music, or the device, by preventing others from reproducing copies of it without the creator’s permission. Creators were granted a temporary mon…