This kind of gets into philosophy, but I think that ownership of ideas is just an indefensible principle in the first place, which is why people generally only

This kind of gets into philosophy, but I think that ownership of ideas is just an indefensible principle in the first place, which is why people generally only justify IP with rose-tinted ideas about its intended practical effects. Here are some major reasons I think it doesn't make sense: 1. We understand that ideas build on each other. It has always worked this way, and it is overwhelmingly the way humans get things done. Every scientific discovery stands on the shoulders of giants. Every story or song is influenced by ones that came before it. Creativity is valuable, but to define the entirety of a creative endeavor as undeniably the effort of a single person is insane. Because creativity builds on other creativity, any legal concept that tries to parcel out unique contributions of individuals or groups and impose a tariff on them is likely to stifle innovation, because any time it actually comes to matter, it can only create an unnatural block on a creative effort 2. Most people who have worked in a creative field understand that a concept or idea is seldom of much value, and must be executed in some way to be meaningful. Various concepts of intellectual property even try to capture this, e.g. by granting rights over performances or recordings specifically. The best arguments I've heard for "intellectual property" abstractly are as an interim solution for allowing collaborations to produce economic value for the person who didn't control the distribution, but this essentially can't function if we treat these rights as "property", because property entails the right to transfer this property, creating a mechanism to effectively void these rights. 3. Attribution is a valuable ethical principle, and giving people due credit for their ideas is an important part of creative endeavors from science to music, but property rights are simply not the correct framework to legislate this with. False claims of attribution can be fraud or sometimes defamation, and attribution can be proven by the well-understood mechanism of demonstrable prior art. Proof of prior art is more technologically feasible to ensure in an era where we have cryptographic signatures to uniquely prove authenticity and the ability to easily publish something with a timestamp to an archive