With the caveat that I am not a lawyer, so I am not competent to give legal advice, and so this is most definitely _not_ legal advice:
I'm inclined to think that once we put our work on the web where billions can see, cut, and paste, that much use is pretty fair. Or, perhaps coming to the same result through a different door, trying to enforce our rights of exclusive use after putting our work into a form and distribution channel so easily appropriated and so impossible of monitoring is asking far, far too much of the limited resources of any court system. When we put something on the web we are asking, requiring, and hoping that an untold number of machines will casually and promiscuously copy and transmit that work. To then selectively enforce "exclusivity" seems, well, contradictory to me. I know it's a minority view, far beyond that of the reasonable folks at the Creative Commons. And it certainly isn't the law. Not today. I expect it will be for my grand-children.
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Chris Lott wrote
But can't the same argument (impossibility of monitoring, etc) be made about providing attribution? I take it that your future is IP and copyright free, which means attribution free as well. What then of the virtuous circle, if not of money then of intellectual currency?
phaedral wrote
Darned good questions. Yes, I think you are absolutely right about enforcement of attribution. And that's the key. We will not be able to rely on the courts for such enforcement. We will, instead, truly rely on community, or, more properly, those communities to which we belong or desire to belong. I can't see any answer which doesn't rest on the value of membership in whatever communities we join.