Reply To Letitia: IP

IP covers one umbrella issue, intangible property as opposed to tangible
property.

IP laws are unjust since you can't steal intangible property. The person you
got the idea, philosophy, thoughts, poem, song, etc., from still possesses
it after you got it. When you take tangible property, the rightful owner no
longer possesses it.

Warm regards, Michael

I'm thinking copyright infringement as fraud. Also, the value of something
you create is diminished if someone else can freely copy it, so you could
Margie they are taking your future tangible wealth away

"IP laws are unjust since you can't steal intangible property. The person
you got the idea, philosophy, thoughts, poem, song, etc., from still
possesses it after you got it."
Sure, they do. But I thought we were are talking about profiting financially from another person's idea, philosophy, thoughts, poem, song, etc. to their detriment. Songs, poems, etc. may be :"intangible," but they can take physical form which is where the profit motive comes in.
Songs can be sold via CDs, poems can be sold via books. An empty CD or empty book won't sell much; they require the intangible property to make them valuable. So if you sue MY IP to sell YOUR book, shouldn't you have to recompense me for the value-added value fo your book or CDC?

Intellectual property is a complicated issue. But I think even those who defend it on principle would acknowledge that the duration of legal rights to ownership of patents, copyrights, and so on keeps getting extended at the behest of corporations and other institutions that are accumulating them, and that this poses a concern.

  If they are to exist at all, I think IP rights should expire upon the death of the person who created the intellectual property, or at the outside, upon the death of his/her immediate heir(s). Corporations should not be able to maintain their ownership of intellectual property indefinitely.

  But I'm not convinced they should exist at all. I would like to see *some* kind of market mechanism to ensure that those who create original, intangible, and non-obvious work that has value to others receive some kind of return on that created value. I'm frankly not sure what that mechanism should be. However the concept of intellectual property as such a mechanism creates significant problems, and I question whether the harm it causes may outweigh the good, especially going forward.

  Consider the myriad intellectual concepts in human history that have become ingrained in society, from the idea of the assembly line, to the idea of the chorus in a song, or the idea of putting glass in the walls of houses to use as windows, and billions or trillions of other ideas. Now ask yourself, would society really be better off if we were able to properly trace the origin and therefore the ownership of all these ideas, so that the heirs of their creators were legally empowered to demand payment whenever those ideas were used? I think not!

  Much of the past is lost to history of course, but the further the Information Age progresses, the more it will potentially become possible in the future to trace the origin and ownership of ideas. Once you acknowledge the validity of IP as a concept, and especially once you extend it beyond the life of the inventor or person who came up with it, it seems impossible to draw a fair line in the sand to prevent it from being extended to infinity.

  We might have to amend the famous Isaac Newton quote: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants -- and if I have been made poorer than they were, it is by satisfying the open palms of their inheritors."

Love & Liberty,
                                              ((( starchild )))

I agree with Starchild that one way to keep IP laws from being burdensome to society as a whole is to LIMIT them. One way to deal with the problems of corporations getting IP laws changed to benefit THEM is to outlaw the concept of the corporate person!
One of the problems with the legal construct that corporations are "persons" and have the rights of actual human beings is that corporations don't have a finite lifespan. They can "live" forever. That's part of what makes them dangerous to society.
Is the corporation more dangerous to individual well-being than IP laws? What do you think? I like the idea that IP rights exist for the life of the author and her or his immediate heir, or for a fixed period of time that is somewhat equivalent; the old idea was that 25 years equals one generation, so you could just say rights last for 50 years and then expire.