The Death of Intellectual Property

[JCMach1]

One of the things that's clear given the current progress of new technologies is that the 19th century notions of copyright, patent and intellectual property are fast becoming obsolete... de facto.

Recent legal approaches have tended to just defend the system as it was (de jure) and ignore the fact that there has been a significant paradigm shift.

Is intellectual property still a viable concept here in the 21st century? Do legal efforts like SOPA ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act ) actually help, or harm the whole process?

Here is just one current take on the current state of affairs:

..Irrespective of moral and economic dimensions, the deathblow to copyright will likely come from the Internet itself. Due to the nature of the Internet, and anonymizing technologies in particular, the practicality of attempting to enforce a pre-internet copyright regime through the Internet is a road that we as a society should not go down.

Canada has experience with laws that engender widespread violation: Consider prohibition in the 1920s. A law violated so brazenly is more than meaningless — it undermines the effectiveness of the legal system generally.

Over time, the Internet will increasingly expose constraints on text, pictures, and videos for what they are — arbitrary and outmoded. In the meantime, it makes sense for Canada not to pass copyright laws that are more restrictive and invasive... http://questioncopyright.org/the_case_for_the_death_of_copyright

I would also add to what the author says above and say that the lack of privacy on the net also adds to the practical death of intellectual property. Think about it for a moment... Who actually owns someone's Tweet? The author? The article (or tweet) they were responding too? Twitter itself?

So, the question is in this day and age... whither copyright? Patents?