Maybe we should phase out patents and copyrights, and switch
to a federal proposal-based economy, where people are paid
based on what they propose to do (and their reputations),
since once an info-product is developed, in reality it costs
almost nothing to copy and distribute it.

Here are some fairly simple reasons that come to mind:

(1) Under a (central) patent/copyright system,
mini-monopolies are constantly being intentionally created,
along with all of the fascist-like qualities of
monopolies. However, with an ideal proposal/reputation
system, resources are smoothly distributed in a fair,
democratic, merit-based manner.

(2) Non-military info-products are immediately applicable by
everyone with almost no distribution cost, so everyone
should be paying for them ==> their development should be
federally funded. For example, if highways (which are *not*
cheaply copied) are already federally funded, why not at
least fund all information products?

(3) Even with patents and copyrights, it’s often very
difficult for private entities to fully profit from
info-products, due to piracy or quickly developed free
generic alternatives; see (2) ==> most “basic research” is
already currently federally funded.

(4) For sufficiently ambitious proposals, there will be
failures ==> fund development in advance of completion to
maintain ambition.

For existing work on reputation systems, from Wikipedia I’ve
read about Whuffie, which is the currency in a reputation
market from a free sci-fi book. There is a social news site,
which I’m not very familiar with yet, jaanix.com, where
“Whuffie controls what you see”. I think people would
naturally only stake their reputation-capital on things they
understand and care about. I think if it’s an important
info-product to some group of reputable people, then
democratically it should be federally funded and made freely
available.