[pessimizer]

Trade secrets like Coke's secret formula aren't protected by copyright, patent, or trademark, they're protected by keeping them secret, and by NDAs with employees who have to know them. So your dystopia has always been the reality. Every single example of intellectual property that you could come up that gets its worth from its privacy has never been protected.

So just to be clear, are you arguing for an massive expansion of intellectual property rights to all secrets?

[Hasu]

> So just to be clear, are you arguing for an massive expansion of intellectual property rights to all secrets?

No, I'm saying all property rights are constructed and enforced by the state and they're all figments of our collective imagination. There's no fundamental ontological difference and the lines we draw are arbitrary. I'd support rolling back some of the IP protections we currently have in place, and I'm also in support of higher taxes in some cases, and other restrictions on physical property rights, but there's not a magical difference between IP and physical property that means we should regard those things differently.

[alexvoda]

Law covers many many fields, and we treat all of them differently. Just because multiple notions are covered by law does not mean we treat them the same.

Maybe we even treated some of them the same but certainly not today.

I would argue that, at least from some points of view, in the past, marriage was treated similarly to physical property. Thankfully we no longer do so.