alt Hacker NewsUltimately you end up in an abstract or values based discussion either way though.
Your question, is the world better off, is impossible to answer in a manner that isn't based in conjecture I feel. Would people not feel the urge to create with a 20 year copyright term? 7 years? 90? zero? Aren't some of the most valuable pieces of software in terms of social good open source? What drives the creation of those?
The closest we have to a counterfactual of the current US based intellectual property hegemony is probably China, who are renowned for their lack of scruples in this matter. Isn't some part of their supercharged technical progress based off willingness to ignore IP? How much? Is California's ban on non competes partially responsible for it's innovative tech sector?
These are all fuzzy questions that are difficult to answer and you end up approaching them with values judgements in mind.
So to restate mine without that controversial phrase; the more people that can access and share information and knowledge the more we unlock the possibility of progress and improvement for the greatest number of people.
Well, that is a more coherent argument than “information wants to be free”. I disagree with your conclusion, but I’ll at least admit that we’ve now reframed the debate in terms I find meaningful: it depends on one’s subjective judgment of the relative importance of two competing interests: on the one hand, the tendency of state-enforced monopolies to encourage producing creative works for profit motives, and on the other hand, the tendency of free information to encourage faster progress.