1778
Pluralistic: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing"
(pluralistic.net)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2023
1778 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
59276 readers
3926 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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?
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.
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.