> Well, that's the fundamental difference, really.
>
> Designing a car may be difficult, but *building* one is also absurdly
> difficult.

Not really, building one just needs unskilled workers and tooling for 
the parts.  The tooling you can just ask a toolmaker to copy from 
existing parts.  The actual difficult bit is knowing what shape to make 
everything and what material to make it from.  If you have an existing 
design you can just use that.

 > Almost nobody would bother to buy a BWM, copy its design,
> build a hundred of them and give them to all their friends for free.

Actually yes companies do exactly this (well not give away for free, but 
sell for cheaper as they don't need to pay so much design costs):

http://www.egmcartech.com/2007/08/27/bmw-threatens-action-against-chinese-copy-of-x5/

> For "content", the IP *is* the product. Which is a problem, since it's
> trivially copyable.

Indeed, it's clearly much easier and cheaper to copy an mp3 than a car, 
but the principle is the same.

> I have no problem with content creators expecting a return on their
> investment. But I object to DRM, on a number of grounds. (Point #1 being
> "it doesn't work".)

You mean everyone knows how to bypass DRM?  You mean none of the people 
who pay for content today wouldn't be tempted to copy if there was no 
DRM to bypass?

 > I have literally no idea what the solution is; the
> only workable one I can think of is "don't bother producing new
> content", but I *really* hope that's not the solution that everybody
> settles on... (!)

Given that many companies still make a lot of money from digital 
content, the problem doesn't appear to be as bad as you make out 
(certainly no need to stop making new content yet!).

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