alt Hacker News>"For myself, the big fraud is getting public to believe that Intellectual Property was a moral principle and not just effective BS to justify corporate rent seeking."
If anything, I'm glad people are finally starting to wake up to this fact.
Replies
I am with you 100%. The phrase “intellectual property” is an oxymoron. Intellect and Property are opposite things. Worse, the actual truth of intellectual property laws is not, “I’m an artist who got rich”. It is, “I ended up selling my property to a corporation and got screwed.”
The web is for public use. If you don’t want the public, which includes AI, to use it, don’t put it there.
Most people here would be interested in Rob Pike's opinion. What you quote is from someone commenting on Rob's post.
The way that Rob's opinion here is deflected, first by focusing on the fact that he got a spam mail and then this misleading quote ("myself" does not refer to Rob) is very sad.
The spam mail just triggered Rob's opinion (the one that normal people are interested in).
The concept of intellectual property on its own (independently of its legal implementation details) is at most as evil as property ownership, and probably less so as unlike the latter it promotes innovation and creativity.
Despite the apparent etymological contrast, “copyright” is neither antithetical to nor exclusive with “copyleft”: IP ownership, a degree of control over own creation’s future, is a precondition for copyleft (and the OSS ecosystem it birthed) to exist in the first place.
confusing any law with "moral principles" is a pretty naive view of the world.
Many countries base some of their laws on well accepted moral rules to make it easier to apply them (it's easier to enforce something the majority of the people want enforced), but the vast majority of the laws were always made (and maintained) to benefit the ruling class
Waking up to the fact that the largest corporations in the world are stealing off everyday people to sell a subscription to their theft driven service?
The absolute delusion.
Neither take is correct. When correctly applied it can be an effective tool to encourage certain sorts of intellectual endeavors by making them monetarily favorable. When incorrectly applied it leads to dysfunction as is the case for most regulatory regimes.
Any tool can be used by a wrongdoer for evil. Corporations will manipulate the regulator in order to rent seek using whatever happens to be available to them. That doesn't make the tools themselves evil.