This is one of the big questions that immediately jumped at me as I read through the book. It's not a criticism, I'm just trying to firm up this aspect of the setting in my head.
How do the Patent Office, or civilizations that use money and intellectual property law, actually enforce intellectual property law? I'm trying to work this out before I even think about running a game, so I have some idea of how the players might reasonably be expected to go about it if the question of actual patent enforcement comes up.
The book mentions that replicators have copy protection built into them, which makes sense. However, this seems like a bit of a stopgap measure. I'm looking at the example of actual copyright piracy in real life. In any situation where something can be copied infinitely, it will tend to do so, because if a single unprotected version gets onto the internet, it will almost instantly spread and become ubiquitously available (assuming there is widespread demand).
In real-life situations, DRM is of extremely limited efficacy; huge companies spend gobs of money inventing top of the line DRM, and some dude in his parents' basement invariably has it cracked inside of a day of the product's release. Look at the recent example of Ubisoft; they implement one of the most invasive DRM solutions ever conceived, creating products that will not even work without a live connection to their servers to verify authenticity — it gets broken inside two days, creating a situation where the only people who need to deal with draconian DRM that actually hampers the product's functionality are the legitimate customers.
This phenomenon applies equally with physical inventions in game, thanks to replicators. Sure, the legit ones have high-tech DRM built in. But so what? Crack one replicator, and it can be used to create more cracked replicators. (Likewise for builder microbots, if you're willing to be a bit more patient.)
So my question basically boils down to whether we should assume:
A) Piracy in Sufficiently Advanced's default setting has about the same status as it does in the real world. That is, it is ubiquitous even in cultures that are ostensibly capitalist and have laws against it, and a significant portion of the population - especially the more technologically savvy - regularly download illicit blueprints for their replicators (not to mention actual software and entertainment media piracy). The Patent Office, and governmental authorities, can no more stop this than they could sweep back the tide with an old straw broom, so they instead focus on periodic and somewhat token crackdowns on distribution hubs (people running piracy infosphere sites, distributors of cracked replicator tech).
B) Piracy has actually been largely curtailed. The question then becomes: How?
With the exception of the Cognitive Union, where presumably no one ever commits piracy because it would offend their deeply felt respect for the law of the land, you're then left with the question of how this is enforced. Now, there are ways it could be done. Ubiquitous surveillance would do the trick quite nicely - Big Brother can watch you very easily with the tech in SA. I could see this sorting out the Tao of History, since they are essentially under voluntary surveillance at all times.
But barring Big Brother or slave meshes, I don't see any easy way to stop widespread piracy. However, perhaps I'm not taking some of the setting's possibilities into account - thus this thread!
