[slowpoke]

>Most sane people support sane IP legislation.

Sane IP legislation is no IP legislation. I don't know why we are still clinging to the ridiculous concept of being able to own abstract concepts. The true insanity is IP in the first place.

[ericingram]

I agree with you, IP is a bad idea to begin with.

Government grants you a monopoly on an idea, and uses violence to stop other people from infringing on your monopoly. But, usage of these non-scarce resources takes nothing from the originator aside from this monopoly power.

[Lazare]

I support, in principle, the concept of IP, and the right of IP holders to enforce their rights, and I hope everyone else on Hacker News does too.

The big questions aren't "should IP even exist as a concept", but instead "how limited IP should be", "what rights IP ownership should give", and "what avenues are available to enforce those rights".

Don't forget, "IP protection" is a really broad concept, and it's more than just patent trolls and DMCA takedowns issued by corporations on content they don't even control: It also includes, for example, the ability to release code under your open source license of choice and then see it enforced through the courts.

[4ad]

Many people, myself included, are against the very principle of IP for good reasons: http://www.stephankinsella.com/ip/

[burgerbrain]

"The big questions aren't "should IP even exist as a concept""

Who decided that?

[cheald]

In this context, I mean IP to encompass non-tangible goods like software and music, as well as things like brands (half of SOPA is levied at people who produce counterfeits of popular brand items). Is there a better term I should use?

[Natsu]

RMS, among others, objects to the very term because it encompasses so many different things and that leads to ambiguity, preferring instead to refer to rights individually, e.g. trademarks, copyrights, etc.

For those who simply want to protest, though, people have been using terms like 'intellectual monopoly' or 'imaginary property' or the like. But that gets you right back to lumping them all together again.

[slowpoke]

You are indeed correct, and I usually agree with RMS on this[1]. It's a bit hard to answer posts talking about IP without using the term yourself, though.

Also, while it's clear that there are different motivations behind Copyright, Patents and Trademarks and it's often important to make a clear distinction between them, I object against them due to the same reason (owning abstract concepts is absurd to the point of insanity), so I do tend to lump them together in a context such as this.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html

[throwaway88]

RMS is also batshit crazy.

[sycr]

Please do not create throwaway accounts to make one-off, potentially controversial comments. It dilutes the quality of the discussion.

[davidw]

Why? Because it has been a pretty good, if imperfect, solution to the provisioning of public goods problem, for some categories of public goods:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#Possible_solutions