When any digital artifact — text, image, music, code, design, video, identity — can be copied perfectly and instantaneously at zero cost, the entire framework of intellectual property collapses. Copyright law, patents, trademarks — all were designed for a world where reproduction had friction and cost. That world is gone.
Explore the full spectrum of consequences. On one end: a post-scarcity creative utopia where all human knowledge and art is freely accessible to everyone, remixing and building upon everything that came before, creativity unleashed from the constraints of ownership. On the other end: creative collapse where no one invests in original work because it's immediately copied, artists can't sustain themselves, and the only content that gets produced is AI-generated slop because humans can't compete on cost.
The Sprawl likely contains both extremes simultaneously — different factions, classes, and regions have different relationships with intellectual property. Corporations enforce proprietary systems through technological lockdown rather than legal frameworks. Underground culture embraces total creative commons. A black market exists for "originals" — provably first-edition digital artifacts — valued not for their content but for their provenance.