Pressure mounts

Polling in Poland, users said they downloaded movies and media because Hollywood and Nashville won’t deliver. They wait years for CDs and DVD and they resent it.

In the UK, a worker unwittingly used his cellphone to download a dozen films and was sent a $52,000 bill. A child inadvertently racked up $14,000 for his mother to pay. In the USA, headlines no longer bother to tell us about too many seizures and lawsuits… but millions download.

Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, senior economists at the Washington University in St Louis point out that what goes by the name ‘Intellectual Property’ is in fact “an intellectual monopoly that hinders rather than helps the competitive free market regime that has delivered wealth and innovation to our doorsteps.”

“From a public policy view, we’d ideally like to eliminate patent and copyright laws altogether.”