this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
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People should be rewarded for their mental labor, but that's not the same as saying they have created intellectual property.
A thought or concept is not an object that can be stolen. An idea cannot be a scarce resource that is used up.
If concepts or ideas can be "stolen" then that means somebody is being deprived of them. But unless you somehow erased the idea from all parts of that person's brain and transfered it into yours, nobody has been deprived of anything, and thus nothing has been stolen.
Ideas certainly will become scarce products if people aren't protected for having them.
Of course you can steal someone's intellectual property. If you copy someone's idea you are depriving that person from profiting from said idea and depriving them of income. There is a limit on how many people can profit from a given idea.
Intellectual property protects those who innovate against predatory practices. You are displaying naivety for who intellectual property is seeking to protect. By not enshrining IP in law you are literally stopping people from earning money from their mental labour.
If IP law didn't exist why would anybody spend their time and money researching and creating new inventions if someone can come along and steal their idea?
You cannot be "deprived of profit." That makes no sense. Nobody is owed any profit for simply trying to sell something.
If I create art to sell, and nobody buys it, I haven't been robbed of anything at all. And that fact doesn't change if somebody walks past my art booth, looks at my painting, admires it, and then walks away. They didn't "steal" anything from me. I haven't been deprived of anything. Unless you want to make the claim that they are a thief now that they enjoyed my painting without paying my anything for it.
If that's true, then everybody who walks through an art fair or gallery but doesn't buy any art is a robber and should be arrested and charged.
The idea that IP protects the little folks who are struggling artists is a capitalist myth perpetuated primarily by corporate advocates that are the actual beneficiaries of IP laws. It's used by mega-corps to lock down massive amounts of content, make billions off of it, exploit actual artists to perpetuate their monopoly on creative expressions of characters.
It's also used by pharma corps to artifically restrict supply of critical drugs to the population in order to make billions in profits and enrich their shareholders.
And the whole, "nobody would create anything if copyright/patents didn't exist" is yet another capitalist myth, disproved by countless examples. As if the entire internet doesn't run on the back of Linux, a free and open source project spanning literal decades, Wikipedia, the largest single encyclopedia of human knowledge in dozens of languages, all the millions of pages of fan fiction and hobbiest artists that have created passion projects with no expectation of making money. Etc etc.
Don't buy into the propaganda.