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Pluralistic: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing" (pluralistic.net)

submitted 1 year ago by kpw@kbin.social to c/technology@lemmy.world

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The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations.

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[–] TootGuitar@reddthat.com 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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?

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

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.