People who at the beginning of the century thought they had trouble with the issue of fair use, can be seen, with a little hindsight either as prophets or conjurors. And they were only talking about audio and video!
For those of you who live in some of the remaining pockets out of the net, let me recapitulate a little.
Five days ago, Philips presented their brand new matter duplicator. This was the first commercially available duplicator with a scan/output chamber in the range of a cubic decimeter (a liter, or approximately a quarter gallon). They were hoping to sell it because of its reasonable price (just 5 billion euros) and the trick of making each sealed component slightly bigger than the chamber itself. Later that evening, the Egan Intelligence Conglomerate (or God, as some people call this AI) cracked this scheme and posted the information so Phillips tried to recall their machines. To nobody's surprise, it was too late and the next morning you could get them just for the shipping charge and a small energy fee.
That night, another major crack was distributed. An undisclosed AI found the way to scale up the matter duplicators, so the size of the chamber was no longer an issue. The things were hard to build, anyway, unless you already had a universal tool, but software encoding these was promptly in everybody's inbox, ready to be fed into you matter-duplicator.
The post office was complaining about having to carry so many of the matter-duplicators, when one per post office would be enough. In an unprecedented move, they installed one in each office and asked whoever wanted one to came by and get it. They started charging a small amount that went to charity, but later in the evening, you also had to take an equivalent amount of mass to get your duplicator. You cannot create matter out of nothing, after all.
The government was outraged. They wanted to shut down the post office. But the post office was already seeing its last day. Now everything can be send by electronic media, ready to be duplicated at your house.
Then the “fair use” lawsuits began. As expected, forms of art or just industrial manufacturing, that had never been (so directly) copied fell under the copying onslaught. Unlike the Phillips product, the cracked copiers don't leave a watermark (Phillips' left literally a watermark: water molecules were embedded in each solid part of the copied thing, carrying the Phillips logotype).
These lawsuits were feeble attempts to make some money out of a lost cause. The real ones came when people started being copied. Kramer vs. Kramer, just like the title of an old movie, is in fact the first lawsuit of a person against herself. Every proof one of the litigants presents of her identity is also proof for the other part's case. The judging AI refused to go on with the case and sentences Kramer (and Kramer) to share all her properties with herself, and refrain from further use of the matter duplicator.
Landsdale vs. Landsdale is a more terrifying glimpse of what this technology may bring in the next week. Roger Landsdale scanned part of his wife's body while she was sleeping and started making altered copies with “recreational” ends. All this copies were brainless, but Mrs. Landsdale claims she has exclusive rights to her software (the software that encodes her body). One cannot help but feel sympathy for her, but there seem to be few legal arguments to support her. Information, after all, wants to be free.