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What's the Solution To Intellectual Property?
StealthyRoid writes "I'm an anarcho-capitalist, and a huge supporter of property rights, both physical and intellectual. At the same time, I find the current trend of increasing penalties for minor violations, criminalizing civil IP matters, anti-consumer technologies like DRM, and abuse of the legal system by the *AA's of the world really disturbing. You'd think that by now, there'd be a reasonable solution to the problem of protecting intellectual property while at the same time maintaining the rights of consumers and protecting individuals from absurd litigation, but I have yet to find one. So, I pose these questions to the Slashdot community: 1 — Do you acknowledge the legitimacy of intellectual property to begin with? That is, do you believe that intellectual property is a valid construct equivalent to physical property, or do you think it's illusory? If not, why? 2 — If so, how would you go about protecting the rights of intellectual property holders in a way that doesn't require unfair usage limitations or resort to predatory abuse of the tort system?"
Seriously,
If you think that defending the control over 1s and 0s is even sane, then you are not in any conceivable sense of the word an anarcho capitalist.
If you can't defend it yourself and you want to whine to big brother to protect your belief in illusory nonsense, then just man up, grow up and give up any delusion in believing in the anarcho part of that.
You are a whiny, big government pussy and nothing more. It is not at all, in any way possible to have one without the other.
The fact that you would even disgrace yourself with such a clearly contradictory question demonstrates your utter refutation of the ideal you claim to support.
In short, fuck off you whiny shitbag.
How can you believe in restricting what people can do with ideas IN THEIR HEADS then? How can you justify government interfering in a private business transaction between two individuals because a 3rd one have been artificially protected from competition. You are not much of an anarchist or a capitalist. You favor a government planned economy where certain corporations (patent holders) are favored over others in the same of supposedly social good ("promote progress of art and science"). Sadly, the current system had effects contrary to its stated purpose.
The real disturbing thing is that you are asking this question at all. Here's why.
What is nowadays wrapped under the common label of 'intellectual property' (copyrights, patents, trademarks) was never, EVER, intended as any manner of property.
The ONLY purpose of patents and copyrights (trademarks being a different thing altogether) is to maximize the availability of intellectual production in the public domain.
Let me repeat that: their only purpose is to help along the enrichment of the public domain.
The temporary exploitation monopoly rights that both copyrights and patents allow are only means to that end; they only exist to make investment in creation and invention economically worthwhile. They were never, ever, meant as the end itself, regardless of what mind-boggingly rich executives would have you believe.
Which makes the very term of intellectual property a misnommer of outright Sapir-Whorf scale; let us please stop using it and denounce its use? Thanks. Intellectual creations don't belong to anyone; we just grant their creators a temporary exclusivity on the rights to make money of them. And that's all there ever was to it.
(Note: IANAL, but the above comes straight from the law courses that were mandatory in my tech studies; details may vary from country to country. Mandatory law courses didn't make me happy at the time, mind you, but man, have they come in handy since then.)
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
"the amount of wealth a person has is generally inversely proportional to how hard they've worked for it. The richest people are mostly the ones who inherited it and didn't work for it at all." Even if this were true, it wouldn't be a valid justification for the use of force to redistribute this wealth. The parents/grandparents/etc of these people have the right to do what they wish with the wealth that they earned with the fruits of their labor. Why are you so special that you are able to declare that they are no longer able to do what they wish with the fruits of their labor?
Its = possessive. It's = "it is"