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The shared dream of "Intellectual Property" has indeed secured many of the social benefits promised by its advocates. Then it got taken too far. Patents on math

• nonrandomstring 3y ago
  Everyone should read into the real history of so-called "intellectual property"- a made up phrase that tries to conflate trademarks, copyright and patents as if they had anything to do with each other. Lawrence Lessig's accounts are a good introduction [0]. Research the censorship laws in the century prior to the Statute of Anne, and the burnings in St James' Square where 'unauthorised' publishers were immolated on pyres of their own books. The first official publishers were granted a licence for violence to smash up the presses of their competitors and burn down their shops. Such a crock of revisionist crap has been cemented into the official, sanitised narrative of "copyright" as wholly benevolent and for the benefit of artists. > such things were once the nonsensical hyperbolic nightmares of opponents of IP laws. Maybe in recent history, on the Internet etc. Historians and philosophers have always understood that the power to control the dissemination of ideas, to control what people read and see, is to control the limits of their thought and behaviour. Little has changed since the Mentelin Bible. [0] https://lessig.org/product/free-culture/ https://lessig.org/product/free-culture/