Re: "Intellectual property is a "right" only insofar as the law says it is"
> Before IP was protected, any new idea was jealously guarded (like Google search engine...) to avoid someone could steal it and profit from it without any effort. Many of them were lost and had to be rediscovered again, maybe centuries later. Hindering progress a lot.
No it was not. Before IP was protected, noone even considered that ideas should be siloed or partitioned off. That's the worst kind of historical revisionism. Artists survived through patronage, an idea that is interestingly coming back in a rather big way. What was old is now new.
It's only fairly recently that the west has embraced the idea that mere ideas could have value that could be harvested since manufacturing took a dive to the cheaper labour countries.
The only people truly interested in perpetuating this myth that the world would collapse without copyright are the large media companies.
A case in point: look at the mess that IP rights have made of popular franchises like Star Trek. When studios start to stomp on fan-made movies because they challenge the formulaic crap that the studios churn out, you realize how f*cked up things are getting.
In the US at least, "...to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts...". My arse.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
