Pooled IP Commerce

This idea is for those who are dissatisfied with the currently used system for commerce in "intellectual property." Particularly, there are many people who agree with the philosophical statement that "information should be free", and yet want those who produce their favorite IP products to continue getting paid to do it. Today's vendors of information products (such as music and computer software) work very hard to force their wares to behave like conventional physical objects - which, once sold, can only be truly owned by one person, and cannot be given away without relinquishing ownership. I think everyone knows what I am talking about. However, information refuses to conform to the merchants' norms, and graciously allows itself to be copied at no cost by anyone with sufficient skill and desire. Thus, we get the perpetual "war" between the vendors and the "pirates", something familiar to all. What I am proposing is for manufacturers of IP goods to concede that once a product is released, it will be owned by the whole world. How, then, would they profit from its making? This is where the new method would be used. Products would be sold *before* they are released. For example, suppose you want to purchase a song. You would go directly to the artist's distribution website (as CD manufacturers are obsolete), and enter your account/credit information as you normally would when buying an item via the web. However, you would *not* receive, as you currently might, an "MP3" or other kind of recording of the song which you paid for, combined with a forced promise not to redistribute it. Instead, you would receive the privilege of being a "stock-holder" of that piece of music. In fact, when you paid, the song had not yet seen the light of day. It either has not yet been sung, or has been recorded but is hidden away in the artist's desk, for example. The artist had made a public, binding promise to release the product (in this case, the song) immediately upon the collection of some pre-determined sum from sales of "stock certificates." In effect, instead of attempting to sell an IP product again and again to each individual who wishes to use it, producers would sell it to the world at large. This model is also appropriate for vendors of software, or even authors of books. The producer would produce the product and withhold it until "the world pays"; after that, it would enter the public domain. A possible fault one might point out in this proposal is that everyone would simply think "let others pay", and wait for the product to be released, hoping to simply "freeload" from the contributions of others by using the product after it enters the public domain without having contributed a cent to its "release fund". However, it is likely that this problem would be somewhat self-correcting, as people would quickly realize that "waiting for others to pay" would simply result in an utter lack of product releases. Thus, I think this might be a workable method by which we could have BOTH unrestricted distribution of all information (no censorship), AND the continued existence of paid production of information-type products.