link to original reddit post by /u/CuriousPyrobird
I know that intellectual property is a bid hangup for potential ancaps wanting to make the complete transition. I myself am an artist and the idea that someone could download my work for free and redistribute it without paying me because they haven't stolen anything, just copied it, was my only real hangup with anarcho-capitalism. The idea that the market will automatically regulate itself in this field doesn't hold as strong to me as it does in other fields. Advocates against IP will say that copied and redistributed digital paintings will be less desirable to consumers than the originals because the consumers want to support the creation of future work. I can tell you this is not the case for most consumers. For how crucial creative fields are for people's entertainment, they just do not value it very much. Very few people would buy a $20 print of my work through my online shop (which I had to price as such because of the hours of work put into the painting) when they could buy a print of equal quality from someone who just downloaded the art and priced their print at $5.
The obvious rebuttal is to watermark the work, but this doesn't prevent those who do pay from they redistributing the work. It's a simple business decision: pay $100 for the rights to an unwatermarked digital file and then sell $10 prints. When this secondary market can undercut the source so easily when the only offered "good" is the idea come to fruition it will surely collapse.
It was at this point I began to think about alternatives to art distribution and I came up with the following: If I were to upload my work to a website, before you entered the site you would need to agree to a set of rules that would contractually bind your ability to download, screencapture, and/or distribute the work found inside. Furthermore, if I were to sell you my work, you would have to agree to a contract that restricts you from duplicating and reselling the work. In the realm of physical media you would also have to agree that you would explain the same parameters (or at least make them available in the front pages of a book for instance) to the person you might ever sell your copy of the work to and that that person must agree to those parameters if the sale is to go through. You would have to agree to pay certain reparations to the creator should you void any agreement. I could see there being a digital file type created that would hold the data of the contract in the data of the file for easy access.
This seems to hold water and not infringe on any voluntary principles, but I want to know what gaps it might have. I present this idea to you now in hopes that it gets shredded apart so it can be better constructed in future iterations .