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by rayiner 4037 days ago
I mean "IP" in the broadest sense. The iPhone is "designed by Apple in California" but everything is "made in China." Whatever information flows from California to China to enable that is IP. As to your second point: having a monopoly over a thing is different than having a monopoly over a market. All property rights are state-supported monopolies. The essence of trade is exchange of monopoly rights as to things. So it doesn't make any sense to say economists are categorically against monopolies.

Existing IP regimes aren't perfect, but appropriate protections for IP are fundamental to the prosperity of the United States. You're way better off as a Californian in a world where Chinese people have to pay tons of money to California for something they build domestically.
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bediger4000 4037 days ago
Whatever information flows from California to China to enable that is IP.

Congratulations, you've just blurred the issue beyond repair. Now, not only do I have no idea what "IP" is, other than some vague "information" (bits and bytes? phrases on paper? verbal instructions? URLs? methods of production?), I have no idea how to tell if some particular piece of information is "stolen" or "not stolen". I have to go ask someone (who?) to check.

My basic contention is that considering ideas or concepts or math as property, warps society beyond what most of us would like, and therefore, we should do away with the concept of "IP". We'll have to figure out something other than an "IP regime" to create appropriate incentives, but the possible disincentives from just about any "IP regime" are too bad to actually implement those "IP regimes".

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rayiner 4037 days ago
It's not a blurry concept. If you're a company in China, you've got aluminum and milling machines. You can import PCBs from Taiwan and SOCs from Korea. What else do you need to make an iPhone? The intangible stuff that's made in California: PCB layouts, machining processes and specs, CPU/GPU designs, firmware, software, branding. That's all IP, protected by a web of copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, and contractual rights.

To tie back to the original point by 'colechristensen: the U.S. is rapidly becoming a country where people spend all day working on products the end result of which is intangible. As production of tangible goods becomes commoditized because of robots and 3D printing, it's going to be the production of intangible goods that's going to give countries' competitive advantages in the global marketplace.

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