this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2023
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I don’t know how the original poster meant it, but one possible way to interpret it (which is coincidentally my opinion) is that the concept of intellectual property is a scam, but the underlying actual legal concepts are not. Meaning, the law defines protections for copyrights, trademarks, patents, and trade secrets, and each of those has their uses and are generally not “scams,” but mixing them all together and packaging them up into this thing called intellectual property (which has no actual legal basis for its existence) is the scam. Does that make sense?
Exactly, "intellectual property" doesn't exist. It's a term that was created to try to lump together various unrelated government-granted rights: trademark, copyright, patents, etc. They're all different, and the only thing they have in common is that they're all rights granted by the government. None of them is property though. That was just a clever term made up by a clever lobbyist to convince people to think of them as property, rather than government-granted rights related to the copying of ideas. Property is well-understood, limited government-granted rights to control the copying of ideas is less well understood. If the lobbyists can get people to think of "intellectual property" they've won the framing of the issue.
So it's just a classic case of someone saying something entirely unrepresentative of what they actually mean, then arguing it to death...?
Could we stop having this meta-debate about what a person who is not either of us meant, and instead could you comment on the substance of my post?
Intellectual property is not a scam.
Ok, thanks for the engaging discussion. Goodbye.
If you think it's okay to copy what someone else has created without their permission, for a product you have not paid for, we have nothing to discuss. It's as simple as that.