alt Hacker NewsThe very concept of IP was a mistake. I understand it helped make a lot of work possible. But virtually nothing useful came from nothing, and the reservoir of human knowledge belongs to all of us. Unless you are Isaac Newton, you took a good idea and made it better or more applicable. Pretending like you own it is just dishonest.
If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
--Isaac Newton
Intellectual property is a broad swathe of different rights and they each have some merits and are worth considering separately.
The trademarks and the protected designations I believe help consumers to know what they're getting and protect makers against competition with inferior products which are superficially similar. So that's things like "Coke" is definitely Coca-Cola's product and not just whatever brown liquid the seller could get cheapest, British Beef isn't actually from America just relabelled for a higher price. Champagne isn't actually a sparkling wine made in California. You can buy cheap brown liquid, Californian Sparkling wine and American beef, but it's right for consumers to know what they're getting and for the vintners in Champagne to know some Tech bro's side venture Californian winery isn't shipping bogus "Champagne" made in the Napa valley that will compete with their genuine product on store shelves in London. If consumers want to drink sparkling Californian wine they can do that, there's no need to use the name Champagne worked so hard for.
The patents are most reprehensible. There the deal is the government gives you a (surprisingly long) exclusive right to make a thing, and in exchange you give up some information about how to make it. Lawyers have managed to finagle providing almost no useful information about "how" in exchange for these quite unreasonable exclusive rights, that needs at least substantial rebalancing. In software it's just bullshit and should go entirely, in pharmaceuticals you can argue about the exact rules more.
Copyright is the most interesting tension. In theory Copyright protects creators - and that seems great. In practice this unavoidably also benefits non-creator heirs "Knives Out" style but that's not really the worst thing in the world. It also though benefits publishers which are corporate entities and that makes no sense whatsoever in the modern era. That needs drastic reining in, if while we're in there we can ensure that the author's grandkids don't get a free ride for life just because grandma wrote this amazing book that'd be nice. Copyright expansion seems to have slowed or stopped during my lifetime, which is good, but it needs reversing.