alt Hacker News> prominent intellectual property law professors
These guys are part of the problem IMHO. Having studied some law at university and then reading all of Lawrence Lessig's works when he dissected IP law 20 years ago for the Creative Commons project, I was left with the distinct feeling that "IP law" is ugly, unfair, arbitrary, ineffective, crippling to the mind, and devastating to progress and the economy.
I now strongly agree with the likes of Richard Stallman that "intellectual property" is a grotesque and bankrupt mess that should be avoided if you want to have any semblance of a mature conversation.
Actually, people training AI have a point. New technologies expose the silliness of bad ideas we've clung to for three centuries. And the only way forward is to hugely reform or repeal most of IP law for EVERYONE.
The truth is that long before the Statute of Anne "copyright" has its roots in censorship and political control. We used to burn the printers of "seditious works" on pyres of their own books in St James' square in London.
Much of "IP law" still functions the same today but hidden behind a cover story about "protecting creators".
I now mentally substitute the phrases "intellectual property" with "coercive control of information" (CCI).
CCI gets to the nub of power relations instead of pretending we have nice IP "laws" that are applied uniformly. In reality copyright, patents and trademarks have become tools of censorship and denial for those with money, and they do almost nothing to protect individual creators. Things like the DMCA are simply monstrous. If we can't reform and enforce it to actually protect creators it's time to scrap the whole rotten show in my opinion.
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In my view IP laws in the digital age are basically a look into what would happen under western capitalism if we discovered any other effectively post-scarcity technology. We wouldn't be transported into Star Trek's universe, we would instead be jailed and beaten for using it.
Only the very wealthiest would be allowed to produce with it, they would form state backed cartels and we would be no better off for its invention.
Trademarks are not like the rest of what you listed - they’re effectively a consumer protection law to reduce confusion about the origins or endorsers of a commercial product or service, though its protection is not restricted to consumers. A lot of advocates of software freedom and the non-software equivalents are more okay with trademarks than with the rest of what is often called IP.
Nobody is prevented by trademark law from offering any product or service, including commercially; the trademark holder’s consent or an applicable exception is only needed in order to use the trademarked name/logo in their own offering’s name/logo.