Steve -
There is no spoon.
That's the best answer I've seen to your questions about decentralization and
property rights in virtual goods.
There Is No Spoon, Yochai Benkler.
Virtual worlds are like The Matrix. The answer to the question: “Who should own this
spoon, the provider or the user?” is, there is no spoon. Once you understand this, the
discussions of “virtual worlds” bring about an eerie déjà vu--“it feels like you’re in a
room,” it’s a “virtual community,” we should have a “declaration of independence” for “new
spaces for self-governance”. There is code, interface, and the social relations they make
possible. There is no “governance of a virtual world.” There is simply the question of
governance in the relations among users of a class of software platforms that have certain
degrees of freedom in their design, resulting in a variety of social affordances, and
therefore facilitating a variety of social and economic interactions.
... [
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/jbalkin/telecom/yochaibenkerthereisnospoon.pdf]
It's also useful to know that this was in part a commentary on the announcement by
Linden Lab that they were introducing traditional copyright ownership for user-generated
content in Second Life.
It was anarchy until the 1920's when people
started stepping on each other. Then regulation and allocation was introduced.
Benkler, 'Some Economics of Wireless Communications' (2002)
[
http://www.benkler.org/OwlEcon.html]
I don't know enough about anarchy. How does any limited natural resource get
allocated under anarchy?
The New America Foundation's Spectrum Policy program laid out an answer by defining
wireless as a post-scarcity world.
Open Spectrum: The New Wireless Paradigm (Werbach 2002)
http://werbach.com/docs/new_wireless_paradigm.htm
The End of Spectrum Scarcity, New America Foundation (Calabrese 2009)
http://newamerica.net/publications/policy/end_spectrum_scarcity