SeeSharp: “Doesn’t take into account the hundreds of billions of $ in IP theft.
mindburglar: “IP isn’t property, so copying isn’t theft.”
Semantically speaking, IP is property by definition. This is, however, not based on natural rights. It is a natural right of human beings to be able to copy and learn from the body of knowledge of other human beings. The purpose of intellectual property is “to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries”.
Modern IP does not do this. It robs the average person of freedom while returning very little. Big multi-national companies trample on the IP rights of individuals and smaller companies while extending their IP perpetually. So much for “limited time”.
The Supreme Court put an end to censoring movies at a local level as an infringement on free speech. However, what should have been addressed is that free speech does not automatically grant IP protection to all speech and print. Not all art is “useful” nor promotes “progress”. Such aspects of IP is under the purview of Congress, CLEARLY. So are the treaties by which these rights are secured internationally.
The Chinese and other nations have completely robbed us in this area. On the other hand, the crony capitalists who are exploiting this IP protection have obtained it through unjust laws that have not properly compensated American citizens for the abrogation of our natural rights.
The obscene movies and music Hollywood produces should get no IP protection. None. (I’m not talking about ALL movies, just the filth that Hollywood spreads all over the planet.) Software should be limited to a business lifecycle of about 5 years with source code and all documentation becoming open source after this. No mixing trade secret and IP rights together.
And we should have never enriched nations like China without insisting on their implementing massive human rights reforms as a precondition. At least for manufacturing and the production of goods protected by IP law. For commodities such as oil, embargoes require help from our allies in order to bring about reform in places like Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Why should anyone be forced to give up their source code after 5 years? There are some programs that have been continuously updated over multiple decades, and some still have pieces of the original source code still in them.
You got it backwards, I said it was property and theft.