So it is with ideas. Humans not only want to know the content of ideas, but also who gave them form, argued for them, or fought against them. Out of this basic property of human curiosity also comes the motivation for obtaining credit for ideas, a motivation which modern society now reinforces with the possibility of cash incentives.
Publishing, though, is not necessarily closely linked to those cash incentives. The motivation to publish is different from the motivation to obtain money via publishing. Some will refuse to recognize this difference. Nevertheless, the distinction exists, and will only become more apparent with the passage of time.
Copyright deals primarily with the motivation to obtain money via means of publishing. Copyright benefits, to a greater or lesser extent, the creators of ideas, the disseminators of ideas, and the consumers of ideas. Certainly for several centuries the primary beneficiaries of copyright have been the disseminators of ideas, those people who have owned the printing presses or rented them for reduction of ideas into print. In the print medium, this continues through the present.
The emergence of a low-cost medium of distribution of ideas, however, helps to show the distinction between separate motivations to publish mentioned previously. The various information networks known collectively as "the Net" or "cyberspace" allow for immediate gratification of the motivation to publish, but are less amenable to the motivation to profit from publishing.
What implications can be drawn from this development? Copyright protection
will be seen in the new medium as more of a hindrance than a help, since
the existence of the medium does not critically depend upon remuneration
for its use in distributing personal opinion. Those whose motivation is
to distribute their own ideas as their own, and do it quickly, are likely
to forego the cash benefits that print publication provides, or at least
to defer print publication until feedback from their Net experience refines
the work.