[bediger4000]

Way more harm than good. "Intellectual property" locks up ideas, which hinders human progress. That might be tolerable if the monopoly so granted was short. But it's not, it's what, life+70 years or something? And it never gets shorter - we only increase copyright term.

The legal setup around copyrights and patents is also indicative of "bad". We can no longer inspect some item and decide whether or not it's copyrighted, for example. We have decided that the default is "assume copyright". You basically have to have a trial to decide whether some use is OK under one of the exceptions to copyright. This limits educational and critical use, and this, in practice, limits free speech.