Shareware - the future of Intellectual Property?

Way back last year sometime James Graham wrote an insightful piece about Intellectual Property - the big 21st century faultline?. As readers will know, as a mutualist, like other libertarian and anarchist descendants (part of the debate amongst whom James highlights), I regard patents and copyrights as one of the four great monopolies that have to be crushed before we get a truly free world and a genuine advance in the conditions of labour. It's not one that I major on because I don't understand it enough yet to make decent arguments - particularly it has to be said against those who tell me that pharmaceutical life saving advances would be jeopardized by any change to this protectionist mechanism.

But as well as obviously following the debate about digital rights/restrictions the subject recently came up at a university board meeting where we were discussing the outrageous economic rent stolen by publishing houses from academics in return for organizing a peer review system that things like Technorati rather prove unnecessary to my mind.

Anyway, I just thought James, if he hasn't seen it already, might like to see this analysis at the Ludvig von Mises Institute blog of the Radiohead album giveaway "stunt" and how it might change the playing field as the CD version of the album goes on sale in the US today: