if copyright was abolished in Libertarian Paradise, it could be quickly replaced by an equivalent contractual scheme whereby major conglomerates require you to enter into an agreement before accessing their products, with penalties for breaking the agreement.
anyone who wished to access Star Wars, Pokemon, Harry Potter, or any other popular franchise would need to agree to copyright or find someone willing to break it, and experience suggests that most people would go along with it.
Depends.
To start with, I will say that I agree with the general gist of your post. However, I suspect we would still end up with a licensing scheme much different from current IP law.
Imagine going into a store to buy a CD with software (I know, so nineties, I work with what I know) and at the cashier, before paying, you’re handed a 200-page contract (That is, the EULA plus all currently applicable IP law) that you must (a) read and (b) agree to before they will take your money.
A couple of things would happen
1) Some people would not purchase the software
2) Others would purchase equivalent but license-free software from your competition
3) In an effort to capture some of that market, publishers would create an extremely streamlined contract; the main difference - looking at what has happened in other fields - would generally be that a lot of cruft would get cut out.
3A) The hard-to-enforce cruft (E.g. “not allowed to resell”) would be cut out because: If the state subsidizes your enforcement you might as well have as many terms as possible and put the burden on the customer - they cannot really go to a competitor because that competitor will have the same burdens because it is law. If you have to pay for your own enforcement, you might as well cut it out - the contract will be less confusing to your customer and that might give you a leg up over the competition.
3B) The hard-to-understand cruft would also be cut. E.g. “Not allowed to modify this software” You see this in e.g. the CC license - in an effort to make people use that license, it is very easy to understand. A private court of arbitration could create an equivalent Easy To Understand IP Contract, a service they do not provide today because they’re in direct competition with the government enforcement monopoly.
You’d end up with licenses that individual people could make educated decisions about. You’re absolutely right that people would still agree to these contracts, but I expect the contracts to be much better. And it is easier to explain to the customer “you’re not allowed to sell or give away copies of this because we needs to get paid” than “you aree allowed to create copies of this for backup purposes only unless we have used copy-protection, unless that copy protection is easily automatically circumvented by standard software in which case it doesn’t count” which is the current state.
I expect that a proliferation of licenses would quickly congeal together into a single conglomerate, which you could opt into once via an easy process.
Then you really would just walk into the store, pay your money, and walk out.
People negotiating hundreds of little contracts on an individual basis seems much less likely than the convenience of a standardised option, much in the same way as you would expect people to standardise on a small number of currencies and other common standards.
Honestly, I find ShieldFoss’s response here to be a bit naive.
If all the record companies and movie studios get together (and it makes sense for them to do so), they can make their standard contract include those supposedly-hard-to-enforce clauses, and their standard contract will be harsher than real IP law.
They simply setup the situation such that any breach which would cause the copyrighted item to escape the containment field means someone violated the contract, and pursue people the few who didn’t and who did not immediately turn over who was responsible under the contract for some kind of conspiracy.
They don’t need to enforce it perfectly, just enough to scare people, and they can flat-out specify the prices in ways that courts will not dispute.
“This contract says you agreed to pay a $1,000 fee for every song you copied,” and oh hey, it’s civil court, so the standard of evidence is still not “beyond reasonable doubt”.
And since everyone will have to sign the contract to participate, it doesn’t really matter if a few copyright freegans on the edges of society don’t.
So no, the contracts will not be much better. In fact, they will be worse.