@baah I appreciate your passion, but I respectfully and wholeheartedly disagree. As someone who has for decades advocated for creative people to own their creativity, I can tell you with 100% certainty that them owning it has nothing to do with slowing down creativity or impeding industrial progress or anyone else from doing anything, it only has to do with positioning creative people to be both recognized and compensated for their work.

If you drive a taxi or build a house you are paid for your work. It should be the same if you write a book or a song or a piece of software. You are confusing the business around creativity which I agree is terrible and a business that has been mismanaged, with necessary intellectual rights. Without these rights creativity would dry up completely.

Look at places like China where there have been no rights. Name one artistic achievement out of that country in the last 50 years. Name one technology advancement. It is because they do not protect and encourage those who create these things.

Creative people do not usually make good business people, history has shown. They need protecting, history has shown. They have been exploited for the benefit of others. The current social networks continue to do this. Every social network including this one runs on their creativity. Without it, no one including you or me would be here and it would devolve into nothing.

Yes right now Steemit can offer people a financial incentive to come but that is just a carrot. They will have to keep people here with good content and to get good content, they will need to protect the rights of those who create it. There is simply no other way.

As always I am open to hear a competing view but please give me some examples of where protecting someone's invention has impeded progress. Before you do however let me give you one and provide insight around it.

Let's say that someone created a cure for cancer and they patented it which means two things: 1. It is exclusively theirs and 2. everyone can see exactly what it is. So for the life of the patent no one could use it. Or could they?

What would you do? I would use the information contained in the patent, make the thing and distribute it widely. They would scream blood murder, but would show I never make any money off my use of their patent so they could not stop me. This is a real occurrence and happens every day in places like where I live in Thailand. They take patented drugs for HIV and sell them or give them away for next to nothing to poor people. Some of these pills are $15 each in the US. Here they are less than 10 cents. What I am saying is that if someone wants to use a patent to make money from it and can't then yes it is a hindrance, but if they simply want to move things forward, nothing holds them back. Yes Thailand is on some IP watch list, but the bottom line is people have access to the drug. In other words, you take out the business part and there is no issue when the subject is real need and IP.

Finally and to be clear I am not saying I like the current system only that creative people should own what they create. Thanks and sorry for the long post. By the way I was a songwriter and composer in Hollywood and represented about 200 writers at one point so this subject is near and dear to me. Thanks.