ve far away from our wishful thinking, our old conditioned reflexes, and our deep-seated, short-sighted, narrow greed. We cannot keep on saying, both to ourselves and each other, that the old rules of the game will somehow continue forever just because we want them to and just because we become very uncomfortable when we think about those old rules failing. We cannot keep looking only at which pattern of laws will (we hope) provide us with the largest possible amount of money in the shortest possible amount of time, and then keep demanding that Congress maintain or strengthen that set of laws. We cannot trust blindly in nice-sounding but unproven, even uninvented, technologies to help us, when so many of the old, proven, well-established technologies have so clearly turned into integral--indeed, into rapidly expanding--parts of the very problems we are trying to solve. I suggest that we need to change our entire frame of reference. Rather than starting out with the status quo and arguing over how to tweak it slightly--a little tighter here, a little looser there--I believe we need to mentally jump to the opposite extreme from our current laws and our long-accustomed practices. Imagine, hypothetically, that the part of the US Constitution that I quoted earlier did not exist. Imagine that our government had neither a Copyright Office *http://www.lcweb.loc.gov/copyright/* nor a Patent and Trademark Office *http://www.uspto.gov/*. Suppose that, when someone did something with a piece of writing or art or music or film or software or whatever--some intellectual "property" that someone else had created--the government did absolutely nothing to intervene, and that no judge in any court granted any rights towards any "owner" of any intellectual "property" under any circumstances whatever. What would happen in this environment? I caution the reader to avoid jumping to any hasty and simplistic conclusions; neither "total disaster" nor "nobody wou...
