Profit without copyright

An elite consensus appears to have formed around the strengthening of IPR r egimes. At the same time, many people, particularly in developing countries , are questioning the idea of paying for what they intuitively sense might possibly be free. In view of the potential for global dissensus on this iss ue, businesses that produce and distribute explicit knowledge, or digital s equences, would be quite prudent to start making contingency plans for a ne w form of global capitalism: one characterised by much weaker IPR regimes. Competitive business strategies based upon rival-complementarity (i.e. phys ical goods and human services that complement digital products) indicate th e feasibility of a global economy-of-things, resting upon a freely accessib le ecology of knowledge. This might be built in the future, in much the sam e way that an industrial economy was built, historically, upon a natural ec ology of available land and biosystems. Such an arrangement conforms to sev eral rather fundamental political intuitions.