There are two mains types of intellectual property (not including patents, which is another field altogether). You need to consider the difference between copyright and trademark. A pop song is copyrighted; the Superman character is trademarked. With the pop song, you can't copy it for redistribution unless you are given a specific license (radio stations, etc). If you have a retail CD around, somewhere on it or its packaging there will be a restriction clause about what you can do with it. It doesn't need to be there by law, the copyright protection stands regardless. It is put there, pretty much, for information purposes. But if you wanted, you could write a song about that song, and sell it. So long as you didn't copy any music or lyrics from the original, your song wouldn't be breaking any copyrights. If you wrote a song about Superman and tried to sell that, then you'd be breaking the trademark on that character. The trademark owner is the only one entitled to do trade on that character. Likewise, if you painted completely original pictures of Star Trek characters, you wouldn't be breaking any copyrights, but you'd be running foul of a trademark if you attempted to sell them. As with all laws, it is illegal to break them under any circumstances - but it's getting caught that does the damage. You could counterfeit bank notes and stick them under your matress for your own personal amusement. It would be illegal (with a vengeance) but you'd only get busted if the authorities found out. As for BOB: You could create a mesh modelled in the likeness of somebody called Bob (or paint a picture of them, whatever), and it would be your work, your copyright. Unless that person had trademarked their celebrity (Madonna, The Spice Girls, etc), you could distribute it to your heart's content. Making something original in the likeness of something or someone is not the same as copying it or them. (Precedent has already established that Bob doesn't even own his own genetic makeup! If you market a vaccine (or whatever) that is made using some of Bob's genetic material, Bob isn't entitled to a red cent.) In the case of Napster, it is true that they weren't themselves hosting or offering any copyrighted items for sale. This is why it took so long for the record companies to get them. Napster was essentially brought down because, by publishing lists of members offerings on the Napster servers, they were shown to be accomplices in illegal distribution of copyrighted material. Their defence was that they were doing no more than the postal service does when someone sends copied music in a parcel through the post. But it didn't hold up - as soon as they put those lists and contacts on their servers, they became accomplices. Napster's real problem is that it wasn't a fully peer-to-peer operation. By hosting those lists and contacts, it still operated in a server-client mode. When you're a server, you get held responsible for what you host. There is software that is fully peer to peer, and that will enable individual computers to exchange encrypted data over the internet without any information about what is on those computers being hosted anywhere except those computers. This fully anarchic set-up will be the replacement to Napster (and to warez websites, etc). It will be the equivalent of you and your friends exchanging those illegal CD copies of music amongst yourselves. I won't give out the names of those various software options, because I'm none to impressed with copyright busting. It is essentially theft.