let me give you a quick idea about what's wrong with the concept of intellectual property. consider the history of recorded music in jamaica. from the beginning, it was made by people with extremely limited resources. whenever they could, they used simple technologies to reduce costs, and often recycled their own and other people's rhythm tracks and ideas over and over again: the most popular riddims in jamaican music have been recycled dozens of times by singers, djs, dubmasters, sound systems - some of them for decades. and for decades, producers and artists were completely unconcerned about the whole concept of copyright; it was simply not a going notion that people owned sequences of notes and so on, and they could either be reproduced or literally grabbed and sampled.
this idea, first of all, helped create the atmosphere in a which an island of a couple of million people could revolutionize the world's music: you hear reggae and ska everywhere, all over the globe. and paradoxically it created incredibly rapid innovation and transformation: a new idea was instantly seized and transformed again and again and again. and it revolutionized the way the world made music: it provided the basic concept of hip hop, in which, for example, we sample chic's "good times," throwing down some poetry over it: the idea of assembling tracks from the history of recorded sound. the idea of popular music as it exists is impossible or would be utterly impoverished without this constant insouciant theft.
on the other hand, consider contemporary american pop music, like the teen preens or american idol schlock or pop country. this observes some legal definition of ownership in ideas about music: you use it, you pay, etc. so first off, the actual history of recorded sound is only available to those who can afford it: corporate entitites, essentially. and second the music is incredibly creatively challenged: without heart or guts: paradoxially (again) unbelievably formulaic and derivative.
i really do believe that the notion of intellectual property is nonsensical. but even if it's not, it's extremely, obviously counterproductive in terms of basic creativity or in terms of access to creation, in terms of originality and quality.