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Notes -
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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