[roenxi]

Imagine that there are two opposing views of a subject and then a big middle ground of people who don't care.

If the middle ground uses a term to describe a thing, then the wings have to use it as well. Or there has to be a real push by someone spending a lot of money on advertising to recast the concept. If someone goes around at the individual level making a thing of talking about "imaginary property" they are just going to look like an isolated crank. It isn't helpful.

[biehl]

On the other hand, when the attention of the middleground people is on exactly the aspect of the concept that one wishes to highligt, then that seems like the right time to highligt.

Tax-evasion done by money-transfers based on fictional value attributions of something. Seems exactly like "imaginary property" to me.

[roenxi]

You can try. But the likely outcome is you'll spend a lot of time defending picking emotive word choices and the conversation is going to get distracted from substantive arguments.

[breck]

> to recast the concept

I agree with both of you. I think the concept has to be recast, and that's going to be a very hard thing to do. I think a lot of money and effort was spent to cast these things as "Intellectual Property" in the first place.

However, it was on HN that I first saw the term "Imaginary Property", and I've seen that more and more lately. So there's hope. If usage of the term grows exponentially, it might happen.