Look at Disney trying to get a grip on Mickey Mouse every X number of years when the original copyright should have died years ago. It's embarassing to anybody who follows the situation.

I think there’s a lot of overlap between what I’ve been writing about re #DEAct and what is covered in The Power of Pull. More of this later.

Until people give up the idea they can sell copies that cost nothing to make by prohibiting anyone else from making them, the enforcement legislation as directed by ACTA will get ever more draconian.

I can tell you how to sell your intellectual work to a large number of people for a lot of money, but I can't tell you how to sell copies of it, given people can produce copies themselves for nothing (irrespective of any compunction about infringing a copyright holder's 18th century monopoly).

The other thing I can't explain is why lobbying for ever more draconian legislation to prohibit unauthorised copies is so much more attractive to wealthy publishing corporations than investing a fraction of the effort in developing facilities to exchange intellectual work.

If intellectual work is expensive and valuable, why are so few working on how to sell that, instead of copies of it, that (as we all know) we can make millions of for nothing? It appears that manufacturers of copies only know how to make, distribute, and retail copies. They certainly know how to buy intellectual work, but they haven't got a clue how to sell it.

You don't see artists themselves exerting this kind of pressure on copyright in most cases – for nearly all artists, obscurity is the real problem, not piracy. The few who are losing substantial coin to piracy are generally too rich to personally care.

But the music and film industries are basically investment banks which exist to manage billion dollar capital pools by _investing in artists_. And at that actuarial scale, with that much money to protect, putting political pressure on the system to stop losses make sense, and free speech etc. is just a place to which they can externalize costs. Mining companies dump the toxic byproducts of their business into the oceans. Copyright companies dump the toxic byproducts of their business into our civil rights and the internet's basic functions.

But somebody has to keep investing in talent, or we're going to stop seeing some of the artforms we've become accustomed to. I think the trick here is to separate the *goal* – protect capital investment in creative works – from the *mechanism* – copyright. I think if we put our heads together, we could come up with a new instrument – part copyright, part patent – which protected capital investment in creation without restricting the creative rights of others. The trick is to separate the *protection of capital* from the *control of ideas*.

This is not an easy challenge, but it's within the domain of operations that gave us things like the GPL or Wikipedia – smart people could figure this out and create a new legal instrument which solves the problem for all parties, enabling creation.

I've already had to face a lot of the problems of protecting creative work with the Hexayurt Project. I couldn't form a legally protected commons because patents were just too expensive, and copyright doesn't cover equipment. So we're literally running unprotected hoping that we've defensively published enough that we're not going to get the hell patented out of us when the project seriously begins to make an impact. This area is going to be the bane of open hardware / 3D printing – ringfencing community creativity with patents because big companies have access to the machinery of the patent system for each little thing they dream up, and individual innovators don't. Patents cannot steal what has already been put into the public domain, but they can steal the future development of that work very easily.

We need deep rethinking, and systemic overhaul – “the price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative” – we need to make concrete proposals which we think will work better than the existing systems, and then we need to get buy-in from people who are creating value. There is an alternative to a “printcrime” future, but we have to create it!

As a consumer, do I like the idea of Parma Ham being verifiably 'authored' in this way? Yes. Do I like the idea that a portion of my cash will go towards the preservation of a unique style of production? Yes again. To some degree I can go with the pasta-music analogy: no-one “owns” the Western musical scale, the grace-notes in a JB breakbeat, the melismatic potentials in gospel music – these are the basic recipes (others have their own) that help me to compose my own menu of songs in every album. To that extent, music-as-folk-tradition and 'fair usage' will always subtend any particular moment of composition – the 5000 years you're talking about.

But if we can economically defend, say, a 1000-year old regional food tradition for its intrinsic quality, is there no conceivable economic defence for (to be personal about it) a musician whose quarter-century of composition and recording is unique – at least, in terms of his capital-R Romantic motivation to make it in the first place?

I agree with everyone that the DEBill tramples over a general human right (access to the internet) in favour of a particular commercial interest (return on IP), and also threatens civil liberties in a direct and worrying way. But I think we should maintain some link between authorship and recompense in digital content, IF – and I accept that might be an 'if' – we want to live in a mixed economy. The EFF's Voluntary Collective Licensing proposal still stands up well for me http://www.eff.org/wp/better-way-forward-volunt… – and I note that Richard Stallman was recently reminded of his own 1992 “DAT Tax” in the Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/… – a similar combination of torrent licensing and surveying (which organisations like Big Champagne are effectively doing for P2P). If the originator of Free Software wants to find a way to “support the arts in the digital age without impeding sharing”, I'm with him.

I don't know a musician who doesn't revel in Spotify as a constant source of inspiration, an 'omniversal pasta' of possibilities from the music archives of the 20th century. But I also don't know one (particularly independent rights-holders like me) who doesn't angst about the appalling rights deal that enabled it in the first place.

As I say, all this is a concern if we want a mixed economy. But as it came up in my Dark Mountain discussion with Vinay and Dougald, it's possible that we are moving into a post-carbon, post-consumerist age, where sharing and participating in a 'digital folk culture' becomes our primary compensation for the end of buying trashable stuff, solid/discardable positional goods. That might be what we have to do to save the planet. But if so, we need transitional strategies to get us there: and surely one of those has to be a cultural-industries equivalent of the 'service-and-flow' model suggested by William Macdonough in Cradle to Cradle. We need 'hybrid' legislation in the same way as Lessig called for 'hybrid' enterprises in Remix.

It feels like there should be a lot more collective discussion around the DEBill: let's see where we all are after the Election.