On February 27, the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research was honored by the visit of Mr. Alan Greenspan, who addressed his audience putting forth a number of questions on the prevailing regime for intellectual property rights (IPR).
As he pointed, the current system still has traces left from when it relied mainly on tangible assets, but warned that the shift in America's production from physical objects to ideas requires careful assessment of the existing regime of IPR, particularly to avoid stifling follow-on innovation, as well as careful assessment of the status of IPR in America's trading partners.
To show that history repeats itself, my take is that this shift in the way wealth is created, from tangible goods to ideas, has put IP law in pretty much the same place where the advent of commerce put the Roman ius civile before the Republic. Ius civile was a cumbersome and formalistic legal system followed by the Romans up until the end of their Monarchy and the beginning of their Republic. Its focus on accumulation of wealth and property, rather than their circulation, ceremonial forms and restrictions for use by any other than Roman citizens became a real hindrance to the incipient commerce of Rome. That spurred the birth of what we now call Lex Mercatoria.
IP law is in very much that same situation today. The P2P cases are the early signs that in the new economy it's just not practical to do business the way we used to. And like in Rome, it's the courts bringing about the changes