EDITED: I suddenly realized I put a "we" in there under the fevered imagination that everybody reading this is from the United States. I attribute this to writing it in the middle of taking Constitutional Law, which naturally is very US slanted. Mea culpa. And edited.
Since I'm probably going to end up in intellectual property law, I've been brainstorming the nature of the economy in SA. I'm also interested in international law, which is helping a lot.
Firstly, one thing needs to be said - the trans-Civilization economy is probably not the same as the economies of the individual Civilizations. The Stored and the Replicants probably mirror the greater economy, but chances are that the Union, the Spacers, and the Masquerade have their own form of economy that isn't the IP-based economy the universe runs on. This isn't any different from modern times - international economy today is pure capitalism (with a lot of merchantilist ideals), but the US is a hybrid socialist capitalism, China is a strict communism, etc. Thus, any discussion of the IP-based economy will largely be restricted to trans-Civilization economy.
There are currently four major forms of intellectual property: patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret. Trade secrets are a special case - every other form of intellectual property must be declared. If you patent something, the technical specifications are public domain. However, nobody gets to use it without your say-so. A trade secret, on the other hand, is something you keep secret. If somebody else develops the same trade secret, they get to use it and you shut up. They can even publicise it and ruin your trade secret. However, if somebody takes your trade secret, you have special legal protections to prevent them from publicising it. In SA, this probably includes having the Patent Office perform a precision removal of the information from their memory.
One thing that was pointed out in another thread is that the terms of IP have reduced dramatically. I'm not certain of this - they may increase. In Common Law jurisdictions, the term of patent protection is set so that a person who wishes to gain income from their ideas will have to make at least two ideas to retain income for their entire lives, since one will expire before they die. In SA, that theory would extend the period of IP protection considerably. On the other hand, with Cognitech being where it is, it's entirely possible that breakthroughs occur far more often, so the intellectual crowd can afford to spend their lives in technological development since the muse will strike much more often. Keep in mind that the law has always been very forgiving of the creative - the muse doesn't strike like clockwork, so they give you half your life to make a second invention.
Lenses represent the largest block of intellectual property, because they are exactly that. Somebody who sells his or her identity, skill sets, etc., to office or entertainment media will probably expect to make money for a good long time. The lenses have to be updated periodically as new developments make the old lenses obsolete, and so people who are on the cutting edge of society, technology, military, or the like will be able to sell themselves for considerable currency value. If any IP has especially long terms of protection, it's lenses.
Piracy is less of a problem than anybody thinks. Lenses are also the IPs most likely to be pirated. However, while a few small companies complain of piracy ruining their trade, in reality this is rarely the case. Generally speaking, a small company is ruined by piracy because their product was not perceived by the general population as being worth the price being charged. Meanwhile, most of the pirates are people who wouldn't pay for it anyway. Indeed, in many cases pirates aren't even aware of everything they've stolen - they just take a lot of stuff and then browse around it to see if any of it is stuff they want. In most cases, pirated data will never be used by the pirate. Also, the majority of people are honest. Even pirates, when they steal something, will often pay for it when they discover they like using it.
As for the dynamics of the currency of IP, it's basically a form of contract law. Remember that every bill in your pocket is a contract with the government that issued it. Indeed, in ye olden days it was a contract for goods - you could trade your bills for gold at the Treasury. This is no longer the case, but it shows the "contractual" nature of all economies. If you work in an IP economy, chances are that you're not actually producing anything recognizable as an IP. However, your brainpower is being put to work. The contract will essentially trade certain resources for certain services. More than likely, there will be an abstraction of IP trading authority, possibly expressed in the form of "shares" of some IP's trading value. Thus, a Big Mac and fries might cost three shares of wormholes, or twenty shares of the Cosmic Caper VX (virtual experience) dating sim series. Cosmic Caper is worth less, even if it's distributed across the universe, because it needs to constantly put in new IP to sustain the value of the series (new copyrights on new games, etc.). Thus, it is more likely that Cosmic Caper will lose all value, thus devaluing all its shares. Meanwhile, wormholes are never leaving their controlled status, so shares in the property will retain their value. It's like owning gold.
Civilizations will probably simplify this, and their currency may be similar to the currency found in Valence - the section. Each section is a share of a government-run mutual fund invested in all the technologies from which the government profits.
Okay, brain empty. End brainstorm.
