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Cars and matter duplicators aren't a great example because the primary value of a car really are the physical assets involved, from the raw materials, to the processing, to the machining. That's where the costs of production lie. If the physical assets became effectively free and the main cost of production was people doing design work, I would indeed regard people ripping off the design ideas of others without paying them whatever trivial compensation could be commanded for the features as stealing IP. This would be particularly true in a world where there were near limitless sources of freely available car designs, but someone insisted that they just need to get the newest, coolest one and refused to pay the designer the $50 that it was priced at.
Free-riders are going to be a significant problem with such a system.
Cars were at one point patented though right? Which is also IP law? So it seems to me that it is a spectrum of similarity. So a portion of a car's value is in its IP, but maybe most of it is physical assets.
What did you mean by "becomes"? It sounds like you're saying:
Since cars have so much physical value, I can build my own car and don't have to pay for the IP.
Since media has no physical value, I need to pay for the IP.
What if the physical assets of a car become cheap? If I can build a car at no cost to myself (or copy) now I have to pay for the IP? What? That makes no sense to me.
My guess is we want to give lots of status and respect to people who invent things (like cars) and if people can cheaply build their own (or copy) we intuitively see this as a breach of fairness, and so we come up with IP.
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No, in a system where everything is paid for ahead of time by patrons, there are no "free riders." Or at least, people are free riders the same way that people who get a free game during a promotion are free riders.
I'm a huge fan of Pathfinder's business model for media going forward. They make the actual rules of their game available for free. I played Pathfinder legally for half a decade, without paying Paizo a dime, and then because I was thankful for the experience I went back and bought a bunch of books from them. I was a "free rider" until I wasn't one.
I prefer that infinitely to WotC's business model for D&D, where there is no legal way to purchase PDF's for the modern books, and the only digital formats available are on proprietary websites where there's no guarantee that content will always be available. (See the recent kerfuffle with Modenkainen's Presents, where they errata'd a bunch of information out of Xanathar's and MToF and then made it so that it's impossible to buy that version of the content anymore going forward.) I would pay WotC for PDF's if I could, but they don't make the format I want to use available. So I buy the physical books, and then pirate the fan-scanned PDF's without a shred of guilt.
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