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Comment on Pluralistic: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing"

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?

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helenslunch@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
So it’s just a classic case of someone saying something entirely unrepresentative of what they actually mean, then arguing it to death…?

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- TootGuitar@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Communication is hard, especially when you’re not having a verbal/visual conversation where you can pick up on audio/visual clues about what the person is saying. Have you considered that you might be jumping to a conclusion about what the person is saying, without realizing there might be other meaning to their words?
  
  Better yet, rather than having this meta-debate about what a person who is not either of us meant, could you comment on the substance of my post?
  
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  - helenslunch@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    There’s nothing to discuss. You’re right. But no one here was making that argument so I’m not sure who you’re trying to debate or why.
    
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    TootGuitar@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Ok, thanks for the engaging discussion. Goodbye.
    
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merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨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.

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