10 ms·

Did You Say “Intellectual Property”? It's a Seductive Mirage

120 points by pearjuice 12y ago

lotsofmangos 12y ago
I prefer the term "Imaginary Property".
- ntakasaki 12y ago
  That's true in some respects, but I think most will agree that pretending it's a little like real property has it's benefits. For example, think about ARM Holdings. From Wiki: >Unlike most traditional microprocessor suppliers, such as: Intel, Freescale (the former semiconductor division of Motorola) and Renesas (a former joint venture between Hitachi and Mitsubishi Electric),[40] ARM only creates and licenses its technology as intellectual property (IP), rather than manufacturing and sellIng its own physical CPUs, GPUs, SoCs or microcontrollers. This model is similar to fellow British design houses: ARC International, and Imagination Technologies who have similarly been designing and licensing GPUs, CPUs, and SoCs, along with supplying tooling and various design and support services to their licensees. All they produce, according to you, is imaginary property. But can you deny the importance of their role? How many ARM devices are in use around the world?
  - habitue 12y ago
    The argument isn't that it isn't a valuable process, the argument is that it's a process that produces something that is wholly unlike physical property. Information like the kind ARM produces[0] is more valuable to society as a whole the more widely it is disseminated. So an artificial monopoly pretending like information is a scarce resource is probably not the best way to compensate them for doing that kind of work. [0] Some information, like intelligence information, is more valuable the less people have it, which is a major distinguishing feature here.
    - wfjackson 12y ago
      >Information like the kind ARM produces[0] is more valuable to society as a whole the more widely it is disseminated. So an artificial monopoly pretending like information is a scarce resource is probably not the best way to compensate them for doing that kind of work. Doing that without properly compensating ARM is like killing the goose that lays the golden egg. ARM is already trying to make a $20 smartphone. There is already a $25 FF OS smartphone. http://www.engadget.com/2014/05/06/20-dollar-smartphone/ http://www.engadget.com/2014/05/06/20-dollar-smartphone/ How much does ARM make from such a phone after all the physical costs are taken out? a few cents?
      - habitue 12y ago
        As someone who once invested in ARM, and has looked at their balance sheets in depth: yes, it's a cent or two per phone. Your unexamined assumption here is that copyright monopolies are the only way to compensate people for work like this. That's not the case.
        msbarnett 12y ago
        Genuinely curious: what do you think would be some other practical, achievable ways of ensuring that the people at a company like ARM get compensated for their work without "putting the force of the state behind their 'thought-property'"?
        habitue 12y ago
        We actually have a bunch of examples since there are many industries which don't have the ability to obtain copyright monopolies or patents (or either). Here's a good list (I hope you'll excuse the libertarian source): http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Without_Intellectual_Property http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Without_Intellectual_Property People are making money today doing creating intellectual products without the benefit of copyrights and patents, and they're some of the highest margin industries out there.
    - IBM 12y ago
      I don't understand your comment. How else would you compensate them when their business model is designing the processors to be licensed to others and not building it?
      - habitue 12y ago
        Is the point to compensate them with their current business model so they don't have to make any changes as a company? If so, then yes, you've defined the solution into a corner here and copyright monopoly is the only way to go. If, however, we look at the actual thing society has an interest in promoting: to get people to do the hard work of original research and engineering optimization, then we find there are lots of ways to solve that problem without granting monopolies or treating information like physical property.
        wfjackson 12y ago
        >Is the point to compensate them with their current business model so they don't have to make any changes as a company Doesn't ARM keep coming up with new and innovative designs? Don't they have companies like Intel nipping at their heels waiting for a misstep? Isn't ARM on server an uphill battle for them they are working on? Why do we need to shake up their business model? To what end exactly? To make smartphones a few cents cheaper than they already are? >If, however, we look at the actual thing society has an interest in promoting: to get people to do the hard work of original research and engineering optimization, then we find there are lots of ways to solve that problem without granting monopolies or treating information like physical property. Go on... what are some of the "lots of ways" ? I am genuinely curious.
        habitue 12y ago
        Please see my comment to a similar question above. I was apparently asking for it by not giving examples.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    All they produce, according to you, is imaginary property. No, what they produce are useful designs of chips; whether they are - or should be considered - property is a different matter. After all, inventions don't become useless or unimportant the moment their patent expires.
    - IBM 12y ago
      They're considered property in the eyes of the law via patents because this isn't some philosophical question and that's how their product and business is protected in practice.
      - icebraining 12y ago
        They're considered property in the eyes of your particular jurisdiction. They might not be in another - even if probably not for long, since chances are the US will bully them into compliance, as we've been seeing with TPP.
  - zanny 12y ago
    ARM would not need to exist if IP didn't exist to restrict the usage of both ASMs and designs of every other semiconductor manufacturer. People would not just stop innovating in the architecture space because they can't profit from it - fab manufacturers who make chips using the architecture can, and do. What you would see is a transition away from everyone reinventing the wheel (how many add instructions do we need?) more towards an open common base set of instructions with extensions per use. And if that standard ever grew obsolete, the technical benefits of any other implementation could be immediately utilized industry wide without the tyrannical abuse of power that is copyrights on the vocabulary and patents on the chip designs.
    - IBM 12y ago
      >People would not just stop innovating in the architecture space because they can't profit from it - fab manufacturers who make chips using the architecture can, and do. Is this real life? I honestly can't believe people actually believe this.
      - lotsofmangos 12y ago
        If you couldn't profit from the IP of a faster computer, you could still profit from having a faster computer. Of course, this might mean that people are less likely to disclose information, which is the main economic benefit of the patent system. I'm not completely against patents, I just think they have grown into something that is now more than slightly ludicrous and needs a serious trim before it becomes un-rescuable.
- malandrew 12y ago
  I'm going to start using this term. It's accurate, amusing and poignant all at the same time.
- archgrove 12y ago
  All "property" is imaginary. Having physical things without the backing of the law is just possession. We create a legal notion of property for the benefit of society. Property law adds the force to the state to my possessions, to stop someone beating me on the head and taking them. Intellectual property law adds the force of the state to concepts/ideas/media/etc that originated by the sweat of my brow, to encourage the creation of more, and to enable me to make a living from it. We can argue to what extent this force is necessary, but to claim that intellectual endeavours are just "imaginary" is to do a huge disservice to millions of people who pour their lives into the creation of new and exciting things.
  - Natsu 12y ago
    It points out that imaginary property is wholly unlike physical property. One is naturally exclusive, as multiple people cannot all use the same property at the same time. The other is not, as information is more valuable when shared. Importing concepts of physical property is sloppy thinking and detrimental to society because it advocates for an unreasonable and unworkable basis. It's interesting in that vein that you have a "sweat of the brow" concept of copyright interest, when this theory has been directly rejected under US law (Feist v. Rural). The term imaginary property recognizes such contributions to society as the product of the imagination and is more productive as a starting place for discussion thereof, even if it also lumps the disparate legal concepts together to some degree, though this may be unavoidable at this point.
    - tzs 12y ago
      > The other is not, as information is more valuable when shared. If this were true, there would be no need for insider trading laws, we'd play poker with all the cards face up, and targets of blackmail would just laugh it off.
      - Natsu 12y ago
        You're pointing out the asymmetry of the value, rather than disputing it. The information the insiders are trading on is relevant to the stock price (i.e. valuable to stockholders), the poker card info is valuable to the other players (or cheats wouldn't be after it), and the target of the blackmail has something important to hide or they wouldn't pay up.
- dkersten 12y ago
  When people around me talk about "IP", I usually comment something like "I didn't realise Internet Porn was so important to your business".
- tzs 12y ago
  That's a horrible term to use, since people will naturally assume it is equivalent to "property that is not real property". However, "real property" means in common law land and fixed improvements to land (e.g., my house and my well are real property, as is the land they are on). My car, my phone, my clothes, and my chess set are examples of property that is not real property, and so in a real/imaginary dichotomy would be imaginary property. Most property falls into a trichotomy: (1) land and fixed improvements to land, (2) physical things other than land and fixed improvements to land, and (3) non-physical things that have been legally given some aspects of property so as to use society's machinery for dealing with property to deal with these non-physical things. There is nothing wrong with the current term, "intellectual property" for things in the third part of the trichotomy. It is property by legal definition, and its origin is the intellect. Another good term would be "intangible property".
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    I'd say that IP's origin is in the imagination, and only a subset is also from the intellect, the intellect being only a part of creative thought. This is plainly obvious by viewing the general mass of the output of some of the major IP industries, such as Hollywood. Intellect is not required to generate IP, but imagination generally is. Personally I don't care that much if this makes the term seem less weighty, perhaps the term is currently overweighted and made to seem more lofty than it really is. I mean, sure IP is used in areas like like biotech research into cancer treatments, but it also applies to stuff like copies of a kids drawing of a peanut man with the last minute addition of a monocle and spats, and I feel that to refer to the latter as intellectual is to do abuse to the word, however both examples could be accurately said to be products of the imagination.
    - tptacek 12y ago
      Similar sophistry can be used to empty your bank account, because the value of money is also intangible; the money itself is just a number. What natural law prevents the value of that number being altered by application of other numerics? The value of virtually all of the world's currency is imaginary; it's a shared fiction.
kabdib 12y ago
Hmmm... no mention of "trade secret".
habitue 12y ago
It's interesting to re-read this article: http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2014-05-17/free-as-in-we-own-your-ip.html http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2014-05-17/free-as-in-we-ow... with an eye towards the overgeneralization of the term.
josephlord 12y ago
Language affects perception, perception affects reality.
- macspoofing 12y ago
  Are you sure it's not perception -> language, or perception <-> language.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    It can (and I thinkt it is) both; you get a feedback loop, and such tend to steer the whole system in a particular direction.
  - josephlord 12y ago
    My statement doesn't preclude the reverse relationship. Each relationship is almost certainly bi-directional. Altering the language is a powerful technique to shift views and change the debate. Totalitarian regimes have used it extensively (and Orwell parodied/warned about in 1984) but it is used in democracies too, see the battle over the language for abortion (life/choice), the US redefinition of liberal and I'm sure many other things too.
PythonicAlpha 12y ago
Intellectual property is a wording that shows, what the intention is: Making ideas and thinking property, thus de-valuating it What is the property of "property": Property is owned by somebody independently from the creator of the property. Thus, the person that has the ideas becomes less important -- important is only the owner and the money, that was paid for the property. Without "IP", rich people can live from their money, and their money pays them a living, just from the interest they "earn". But with IP they can also own your ideas and we all become slaves to the rich.
api 12y ago
I want to believe, but there's an elephant in the way. GNU, Linux, the free BSDs, etc. have done a lot, but in the end they have only copied the work that came before them. You can see it from the surface down-- the GUIs are copies of Windows or Mac, and the OS kernel is a copy of AT&T Bell Labs Unix with ideas from other newer OSes. I've come around to the view that the basement/garage hacker who changes the world is largely a myth. It's a very popular one and a very American individualist one, but I see few if any real world examples. Most people around here have probably seen this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY This wasn't the product of basement hackers. It was the product of enormous amounts of DARPA money used to pay a good number of very smart people to focus on the problems of human-computer interaction full time for many years. I want to believe. Please show me the basement/indy hacker equivalent of that demo. Sure, basement hackers can make innovations... a little here, a little there. They can also do an excellent job making copies of commercial/military stuff, and in some cases the copies are a bit better than the original. I'm not saying this work has no value. But it doesn't innovate much and it certainly doesn't invent. Invention is a hundred times harder than innovation. IP sucks. It's a bad system. But consider what it is attempting to accomplish. It's trying to create a mechanism whereby really innovative work can really pay. It's attempting to reward investments in really pushing the line forward. In its present form it does a poor job of that, but that's the intent. Edit: I think the same logic also applies to startups, but to a somewhat lesser extent. Startups do sometimes have money, and can therefore focus on problems and employ people. But they must get revenue fast, which hugely limits their ability to play and experiment. As a result startups can innovate -- improve existing things -- but they generally cannot invent. Most startups that attempt to invent run out of runway and crash in the weeds. Invention seems to require a financier who is willing to throw money away, such as DARPA, NSF, etc... traditionally either nation-states or really freaking huge companies with money to burn. Invention is also hard for startups because there is little to no way to monetize it. That's the problem that IP attempts but largely fails to solve.
- PythonicAlpha 12y ago
  It's attempting to reward investments in really pushing the line forward ... No, I don't think so. IP was never meant to help innovative people. IP -- at least as it was created in the last decades (before, nobody talked about IP, but patents and trademarks and ideas -- no IP) -- is a fighting term that was coined to create a new form of property -- thus, after having things and than land, now also have ideas "own-able". Ideas are no property. How can they? That is just a bad, bad word. And when you say, that the intent would be to help people with ideas, I can not consent! It is something to make investors and owners happy! To make rich people happy and steal from those with the ideas.
assaflavie 12y ago
This sounds very Wittgensteinian. In terms of his philosophy of language, what we have here is a "metaphor gone wild". You take "intellectual" and "property", you put them together as a metaphorical phrase that on the face of it seems meaningful and semantically sound, and people start believe that there's actually such a thing; that it's not made up word-lego. It takes careful awareness to language to be able to point this out, as Stallman does. Just because there's a word for it, doesn't make it meaningful.
- adrianmsmith 12y ago
  "word-lego"! That's a great phrase :-)
- cynicalkane 12y ago
  Sorry, in Wittgenstein words are meaningful if they correspond to predictable results in communication. If we can reasonably predict how the world will react to the words "intellectual property", then the phrase is "real". Meaning, for Wittgenstein, is usage. The world, if you were wondering, will look dimly upon second-hand interpretations of a dead, legally irrelevant philosopher if you're caught in the courtroom violating someone else's intellectual property. If you want to fight intellectual property you first have to acknowledge that, yes, it is a real thing. Our legal system has made it so. Just like physical property is a thing, corporate free speech is a thing, equal protection of the law is a thing, &c.
  - assaflavie 12y ago
    I'm sorry but "predictable results in communication" is not the criterion for being meaningful. If you fart in a courtroom, you get very predictable results, too. The phrase isn't 'real' just because some people use it. People use "God" quite a lot, and that doesn't make it a meaningful concept. (why do I feel I just unleashed an unholy flame war from hell with that last analogy?)
    - drdeca 12y ago
      I suppose that strictly speaking, the use of a phrase by many people does not imply that it has a "meaning" (for certain definitions of meaning) (if many people inserted "whum" as an adjective into some of their sentences, but had no real idea behind it, I suppose it might not be meaningful) However, if many people say "invisible cherry" when they are talking about a door or opening, or means of accessing something, then it would be reasonable to say both that "invisible cherries exist", and to say "the phrase 'invisible cherry' is meaningful." Also, while there is no set of all sets, I would argue that (again, for some definition of meaningful), the phrase "the universal set(the set of all sets)" is both meaningful and useful. Also, if you wanted to avoid a flame war with that last bit, it may have been useful to instead claim that "magic" is meaningless due to being inherently self contradictory (by definition). I would disagree with that claim, but I think it would make a similar argument without being as likely to cause a flame war (though I doubt it would happen in either case) However, I acknowledge that you did not say magic, and I am not attempting to use a straw man as if you had.
mpyne 12y ago
I've always been fascinated by the FSF's interplay with IP law. Mostly because of the 'copyleft' hack, which is the core underpinning of the GPL and, by extension, GNU. If you didn't have IP law at all, what you'd have is effectively public domain, without even the 'moral right' of attribution of authorship. The kinds of systems you'd be able to build with that would resemble BSD codes, not GPL codes. This would suffice for open-source software, to be sure, but not for Free software with all the political trappings that it brings [1]. In much the same way as DRM aims to restrict what you can do with the bits and bytes of media and code in favor of the 'IP holders', copyleft aims to restrict what you can do with the bits and bytes of source and even binary codes in favor of the 'IP users'. While the class of set of people benefiting from IP is different, it all still relies on IP. [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-copyleft.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-copyleft.html
- Mathnerd314 12y ago
  But presumably you'd also be able to reverse-engineer the binaries much more freely (currently the DMCA prohibits most of those activities), so the market for source code would have a lot more players than just the original owner. Consider the interplay between Wine and Microsoft; in the absence of IP, Wine would probably be a lot more feature-ful and popular, perhaps even driving Microsoft out of business.
  - MichaelGG 12y ago
    Without IP you wouldn't need Wine, you could just copy Windows as much as needed.
- mlinksva 12y ago
  Forced transparency does not need to rely on copyright. If it is a good idea, it should be advocated as consumer, competition or procurement regulation, applied to all software.
  - mpyne 12y ago
    Calling a turd "transparency regulation" instead of "intellectual property" is just changing the name of the same thing. Under any copyleft type of regime, even if you remove copyright and replace with some other enabling law, you're still using legal controls to enforce rights management of bits and bytes.
macspoofing 12y ago
I think most people have an intuitive notion of "intellectual property". That intuition is probably not inline with actual laws on books, but I'm reasonably sure if you ask most people, they'd agree that a film studio, a writer, a painter, a musician, a software developer should be able to have exclusive rights of distribution of their work under some constraints. Obviously the devil is in the details, but at a high-level, I think that's a pretty mainstream, reasonable view.
- cm127 12y ago
  You missed the entire point. Software uses patents, so people literally can't imitate others' works like some artists do. And that's the problem with over-generalization: it's a useless abstraction that doesn't generalize well.
  - macspoofing 12y ago
    >You missed the entire point. Software uses patents, I haven't, I just didn't focus on software patents because software patents are just one niche within the larger "Intellectual Property" framework. Even if you get rid of software patents, and I can be convinced either way, you're still left with patents in general, and copyright. >And that's the problem with over-generalization IP? I think it's a useful abstraction. Patents, software or otherwise, trademarks and copyright all are rooted in the same ideology. Giving a content creator a conditional exclusive right of distribution of a creative work.
    - cm127 12y ago
      You did miss the point. Read the article. It's about how all IP is not the same because they originated from different places and they do different things. For example, software uses patents. That's not just a niche, that's an entire category of IP. Copyright is also an entire category that artists use to "protect" their work. But what kind of protection? It's different between patent and copyright, so just saying I have IP rights, is as vague as you can possible be because you don't have them all - just some.
logicallee 12y ago
> The clearest way out of the confusion is to reject the term entirely. Not really - just like the clearest way to separate criminal and civil liability isn't to just stop using the word "illegal". The easiest way is to just learn the distinction. It doesn't take long. It takes about 30 seconds to explain intellectual property (copyright = exact original content, patent = protects a general mechanism, nobody can solve the same problem the same way, trademark = about consumer confusion, only one company can use a word or other thing to sell a specific type of product). Actually that was more like 15 seconds, wasn't it? I have absolutely no problem with calling all of the above intellectual property, because all of it keeps me from doing certain things, just like I'm not allowed to walk on some tiles just because they happen to be in the middle of my neighbor's house, and his property is protected by law. I'm not just referring to taking them - I can't even walk on them without his permission. Property rights are a fine expression. If it causes confusion, this can be cleared up directly. I just don't see the problem here.

120 points by pearjuice 12y ago

lotsofmangos 12y ago

I prefer the term "Imaginary Property".

ntakasaki 12y ago
That's true in some respects, but I think most will agree that pretending it's a little like real property has it's benefits. For example, think about ARM Holdings. From Wiki: >Unlike most traditional microprocessor suppliers, such as: Intel, Freescale (the former semiconductor division of Motorola) and Renesas (a former joint venture between Hitachi and Mitsubishi Electric),[40] ARM only creates and licenses its technology as intellectual property (IP), rather than manufacturing and sellIng its own physical CPUs, GPUs, SoCs or microcontrollers. This model is similar to fellow British design houses: ARC International, and Imagination Technologies who have similarly been designing and licensing GPUs, CPUs, and SoCs, along with supplying tooling and various design and support services to their licensees. All they produce, according to you, is imaginary property. But can you deny the importance of their role? How many ARM devices are in use around the world?
- habitue 12y ago
  The argument isn't that it isn't a valuable process, the argument is that it's a process that produces something that is wholly unlike physical property. Information like the kind ARM produces[0] is more valuable to society as a whole the more widely it is disseminated. So an artificial monopoly pretending like information is a scarce resource is probably not the best way to compensate them for doing that kind of work. [0] Some information, like intelligence information, is more valuable the less people have it, which is a major distinguishing feature here.
  - wfjackson 12y ago
    >Information like the kind ARM produces[0] is more valuable to society as a whole the more widely it is disseminated. So an artificial monopoly pretending like information is a scarce resource is probably not the best way to compensate them for doing that kind of work. Doing that without properly compensating ARM is like killing the goose that lays the golden egg. ARM is already trying to make a $20 smartphone. There is already a $25 FF OS smartphone. http://www.engadget.com/2014/05/06/20-dollar-smartphone/ http://www.engadget.com/2014/05/06/20-dollar-smartphone/ How much does ARM make from such a phone after all the physical costs are taken out? a few cents?
    - habitue 12y ago
      As someone who once invested in ARM, and has looked at their balance sheets in depth: yes, it's a cent or two per phone. Your unexamined assumption here is that copyright monopolies are the only way to compensate people for work like this. That's not the case.
      - msbarnett 12y ago
        Genuinely curious: what do you think would be some other practical, achievable ways of ensuring that the people at a company like ARM get compensated for their work without "putting the force of the state behind their 'thought-property'"?
        habitue 12y ago
        We actually have a bunch of examples since there are many industries which don't have the ability to obtain copyright monopolies or patents (or either). Here's a good list (I hope you'll excuse the libertarian source): http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Without_Intellectual_Property http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Without_Intellectual_Property People are making money today doing creating intellectual products without the benefit of copyrights and patents, and they're some of the highest margin industries out there.
  - IBM 12y ago
    I don't understand your comment. How else would you compensate them when their business model is designing the processors to be licensed to others and not building it?
    - habitue 12y ago
      Is the point to compensate them with their current business model so they don't have to make any changes as a company? If so, then yes, you've defined the solution into a corner here and copyright monopoly is the only way to go. If, however, we look at the actual thing society has an interest in promoting: to get people to do the hard work of original research and engineering optimization, then we find there are lots of ways to solve that problem without granting monopolies or treating information like physical property.
      - wfjackson 12y ago
        >Is the point to compensate them with their current business model so they don't have to make any changes as a company Doesn't ARM keep coming up with new and innovative designs? Don't they have companies like Intel nipping at their heels waiting for a misstep? Isn't ARM on server an uphill battle for them they are working on? Why do we need to shake up their business model? To what end exactly? To make smartphones a few cents cheaper than they already are? >If, however, we look at the actual thing society has an interest in promoting: to get people to do the hard work of original research and engineering optimization, then we find there are lots of ways to solve that problem without granting monopolies or treating information like physical property. Go on... what are some of the "lots of ways" ? I am genuinely curious.
        habitue 12y ago
        Please see my comment to a similar question above. I was apparently asking for it by not giving examples.
- icebraining 12y ago
  All they produce, according to you, is imaginary property. No, what they produce are useful designs of chips; whether they are - or should be considered - property is a different matter. After all, inventions don't become useless or unimportant the moment their patent expires.
  - IBM 12y ago
    They're considered property in the eyes of the law via patents because this isn't some philosophical question and that's how their product and business is protected in practice.
    - icebraining 12y ago
      They're considered property in the eyes of your particular jurisdiction. They might not be in another - even if probably not for long, since chances are the US will bully them into compliance, as we've been seeing with TPP.
- zanny 12y ago
  ARM would not need to exist if IP didn't exist to restrict the usage of both ASMs and designs of every other semiconductor manufacturer. People would not just stop innovating in the architecture space because they can't profit from it - fab manufacturers who make chips using the architecture can, and do. What you would see is a transition away from everyone reinventing the wheel (how many add instructions do we need?) more towards an open common base set of instructions with extensions per use. And if that standard ever grew obsolete, the technical benefits of any other implementation could be immediately utilized industry wide without the tyrannical abuse of power that is copyrights on the vocabulary and patents on the chip designs.
  - IBM 12y ago
    >People would not just stop innovating in the architecture space because they can't profit from it - fab manufacturers who make chips using the architecture can, and do. Is this real life? I honestly can't believe people actually believe this.
    - lotsofmangos 12y ago
      If you couldn't profit from the IP of a faster computer, you could still profit from having a faster computer. Of course, this might mean that people are less likely to disclose information, which is the main economic benefit of the patent system. I'm not completely against patents, I just think they have grown into something that is now more than slightly ludicrous and needs a serious trim before it becomes un-rescuable.
malandrew 12y ago
I'm going to start using this term. It's accurate, amusing and poignant all at the same time.
archgrove 12y ago
All "property" is imaginary. Having physical things without the backing of the law is just possession. We create a legal notion of property for the benefit of society. Property law adds the force to the state to my possessions, to stop someone beating me on the head and taking them. Intellectual property law adds the force of the state to concepts/ideas/media/etc that originated by the sweat of my brow, to encourage the creation of more, and to enable me to make a living from it. We can argue to what extent this force is necessary, but to claim that intellectual endeavours are just "imaginary" is to do a huge disservice to millions of people who pour their lives into the creation of new and exciting things.
- Natsu 12y ago
  It points out that imaginary property is wholly unlike physical property. One is naturally exclusive, as multiple people cannot all use the same property at the same time. The other is not, as information is more valuable when shared. Importing concepts of physical property is sloppy thinking and detrimental to society because it advocates for an unreasonable and unworkable basis. It's interesting in that vein that you have a "sweat of the brow" concept of copyright interest, when this theory has been directly rejected under US law (Feist v. Rural). The term imaginary property recognizes such contributions to society as the product of the imagination and is more productive as a starting place for discussion thereof, even if it also lumps the disparate legal concepts together to some degree, though this may be unavoidable at this point.
  - tzs 12y ago
    > The other is not, as information is more valuable when shared. If this were true, there would be no need for insider trading laws, we'd play poker with all the cards face up, and targets of blackmail would just laugh it off.
    - Natsu 12y ago
      You're pointing out the asymmetry of the value, rather than disputing it. The information the insiders are trading on is relevant to the stock price (i.e. valuable to stockholders), the poker card info is valuable to the other players (or cheats wouldn't be after it), and the target of the blackmail has something important to hide or they wouldn't pay up.
dkersten 12y ago
When people around me talk about "IP", I usually comment something like "I didn't realise Internet Porn was so important to your business".
tzs 12y ago
That's a horrible term to use, since people will naturally assume it is equivalent to "property that is not real property". However, "real property" means in common law land and fixed improvements to land (e.g., my house and my well are real property, as is the land they are on). My car, my phone, my clothes, and my chess set are examples of property that is not real property, and so in a real/imaginary dichotomy would be imaginary property. Most property falls into a trichotomy: (1) land and fixed improvements to land, (2) physical things other than land and fixed improvements to land, and (3) non-physical things that have been legally given some aspects of property so as to use society's machinery for dealing with property to deal with these non-physical things. There is nothing wrong with the current term, "intellectual property" for things in the third part of the trichotomy. It is property by legal definition, and its origin is the intellect. Another good term would be "intangible property".
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  I'd say that IP's origin is in the imagination, and only a subset is also from the intellect, the intellect being only a part of creative thought. This is plainly obvious by viewing the general mass of the output of some of the major IP industries, such as Hollywood. Intellect is not required to generate IP, but imagination generally is. Personally I don't care that much if this makes the term seem less weighty, perhaps the term is currently overweighted and made to seem more lofty than it really is. I mean, sure IP is used in areas like like biotech research into cancer treatments, but it also applies to stuff like copies of a kids drawing of a peanut man with the last minute addition of a monocle and spats, and I feel that to refer to the latter as intellectual is to do abuse to the word, however both examples could be accurately said to be products of the imagination.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    Similar sophistry can be used to empty your bank account, because the value of money is also intangible; the money itself is just a number. What natural law prevents the value of that number being altered by application of other numerics? The value of virtually all of the world's currency is imaginary; it's a shared fiction.

kabdib 12y ago

Hmmm... no mention of "trade secret".

habitue 12y ago

It's interesting to re-read this article: http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2014-05-17/free-as-in-we-own-your-ip.html http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2014-05-17/free-as-in-we-ow... with an eye towards the overgeneralization of the term.

josephlord 12y ago

Language affects perception, perception affects reality.

macspoofing 12y ago
Are you sure it's not perception -> language, or perception <-> language.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  It can (and I thinkt it is) both; you get a feedback loop, and such tend to steer the whole system in a particular direction.
- josephlord 12y ago
  My statement doesn't preclude the reverse relationship. Each relationship is almost certainly bi-directional. Altering the language is a powerful technique to shift views and change the debate. Totalitarian regimes have used it extensively (and Orwell parodied/warned about in 1984) but it is used in democracies too, see the battle over the language for abortion (life/choice), the US redefinition of liberal and I'm sure many other things too.

PythonicAlpha 12y ago

Intellectual property is a wording that shows, what the intention is: Making ideas and thinking property, thus de-valuating it What is the property of "property": Property is owned by somebody independently from the creator of the property. Thus, the person that has the ideas becomes less important -- important is only the owner and the money, that was paid for the property. Without "IP", rich people can live from their money, and their money pays them a living, just from the interest they "earn". But with IP they can also own your ideas and we all become slaves to the rich.

api 12y ago

I want to believe, but there's an elephant in the way. GNU, Linux, the free BSDs, etc. have done a lot, but in the end they have only copied the work that came before them. You can see it from the surface down-- the GUIs are copies of Windows or Mac, and the OS kernel is a copy of AT&T Bell Labs Unix with ideas from other newer OSes. I've come around to the view that the basement/garage hacker who changes the world is largely a myth. It's a very popular one and a very American individualist one, but I see few if any real world examples. Most people around here have probably seen this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY This wasn't the product of basement hackers. It was the product of enormous amounts of DARPA money used to pay a good number of very smart people to focus on the problems of human-computer interaction full time for many years. I want to believe. Please show me the basement/indy hacker equivalent of that demo. Sure, basement hackers can make innovations... a little here, a little there. They can also do an excellent job making copies of commercial/military stuff, and in some cases the copies are a bit better than the original. I'm not saying this work has no value. But it doesn't innovate much and it certainly doesn't invent. Invention is a hundred times harder than innovation. IP sucks. It's a bad system. But consider what it is attempting to accomplish. It's trying to create a mechanism whereby really innovative work can really pay. It's attempting to reward investments in really pushing the line forward. In its present form it does a poor job of that, but that's the intent. Edit: I think the same logic also applies to startups, but to a somewhat lesser extent. Startups do sometimes have money, and can therefore focus on problems and employ people. But they must get revenue fast, which hugely limits their ability to play and experiment. As a result startups can innovate -- improve existing things -- but they generally cannot invent. Most startups that attempt to invent run out of runway and crash in the weeds. Invention seems to require a financier who is willing to throw money away, such as DARPA, NSF, etc... traditionally either nation-states or really freaking huge companies with money to burn. Invention is also hard for startups because there is little to no way to monetize it. That's the problem that IP attempts but largely fails to solve.

PythonicAlpha 12y ago
It's attempting to reward investments in really pushing the line forward ... No, I don't think so. IP was never meant to help innovative people. IP -- at least as it was created in the last decades (before, nobody talked about IP, but patents and trademarks and ideas -- no IP) -- is a fighting term that was coined to create a new form of property -- thus, after having things and than land, now also have ideas "own-able". Ideas are no property. How can they? That is just a bad, bad word. And when you say, that the intent would be to help people with ideas, I can not consent! It is something to make investors and owners happy! To make rich people happy and steal from those with the ideas.

assaflavie 12y ago

This sounds very Wittgensteinian. In terms of his philosophy of language, what we have here is a "metaphor gone wild". You take "intellectual" and "property", you put them together as a metaphorical phrase that on the face of it seems meaningful and semantically sound, and people start believe that there's actually such a thing; that it's not made up word-lego. It takes careful awareness to language to be able to point this out, as Stallman does. Just because there's a word for it, doesn't make it meaningful.

adrianmsmith 12y ago
"word-lego"! That's a great phrase :-)
cynicalkane 12y ago
Sorry, in Wittgenstein words are meaningful if they correspond to predictable results in communication. If we can reasonably predict how the world will react to the words "intellectual property", then the phrase is "real". Meaning, for Wittgenstein, is usage. The world, if you were wondering, will look dimly upon second-hand interpretations of a dead, legally irrelevant philosopher if you're caught in the courtroom violating someone else's intellectual property. If you want to fight intellectual property you first have to acknowledge that, yes, it is a real thing. Our legal system has made it so. Just like physical property is a thing, corporate free speech is a thing, equal protection of the law is a thing, &c.
- assaflavie 12y ago
  I'm sorry but "predictable results in communication" is not the criterion for being meaningful. If you fart in a courtroom, you get very predictable results, too. The phrase isn't 'real' just because some people use it. People use "God" quite a lot, and that doesn't make it a meaningful concept. (why do I feel I just unleashed an unholy flame war from hell with that last analogy?)
  - drdeca 12y ago
    I suppose that strictly speaking, the use of a phrase by many people does not imply that it has a "meaning" (for certain definitions of meaning) (if many people inserted "whum" as an adjective into some of their sentences, but had no real idea behind it, I suppose it might not be meaningful) However, if many people say "invisible cherry" when they are talking about a door or opening, or means of accessing something, then it would be reasonable to say both that "invisible cherries exist", and to say "the phrase 'invisible cherry' is meaningful." Also, while there is no set of all sets, I would argue that (again, for some definition of meaningful), the phrase "the universal set(the set of all sets)" is both meaningful and useful. Also, if you wanted to avoid a flame war with that last bit, it may have been useful to instead claim that "magic" is meaningless due to being inherently self contradictory (by definition). I would disagree with that claim, but I think it would make a similar argument without being as likely to cause a flame war (though I doubt it would happen in either case) However, I acknowledge that you did not say magic, and I am not attempting to use a straw man as if you had.

mpyne 12y ago

I've always been fascinated by the FSF's interplay with IP law. Mostly because of the 'copyleft' hack, which is the core underpinning of the GPL and, by extension, GNU. If you didn't have IP law at all, what you'd have is effectively public domain, without even the 'moral right' of attribution of authorship. The kinds of systems you'd be able to build with that would resemble BSD codes, not GPL codes. This would suffice for open-source software, to be sure, but not for Free software with all the political trappings that it brings [1]. In much the same way as DRM aims to restrict what you can do with the bits and bytes of media and code in favor of the 'IP holders', copyleft aims to restrict what you can do with the bits and bytes of source and even binary codes in favor of the 'IP users'. While the class of set of people benefiting from IP is different, it all still relies on IP. [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-copyleft.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-copyleft.html

Mathnerd314 12y ago
But presumably you'd also be able to reverse-engineer the binaries much more freely (currently the DMCA prohibits most of those activities), so the market for source code would have a lot more players than just the original owner. Consider the interplay between Wine and Microsoft; in the absence of IP, Wine would probably be a lot more feature-ful and popular, perhaps even driving Microsoft out of business.
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  Without IP you wouldn't need Wine, you could just copy Windows as much as needed.
mlinksva 12y ago
Forced transparency does not need to rely on copyright. If it is a good idea, it should be advocated as consumer, competition or procurement regulation, applied to all software.
- mpyne 12y ago
  Calling a turd "transparency regulation" instead of "intellectual property" is just changing the name of the same thing. Under any copyleft type of regime, even if you remove copyright and replace with some other enabling law, you're still using legal controls to enforce rights management of bits and bytes.

macspoofing 12y ago

I think most people have an intuitive notion of "intellectual property". That intuition is probably not inline with actual laws on books, but I'm reasonably sure if you ask most people, they'd agree that a film studio, a writer, a painter, a musician, a software developer should be able to have exclusive rights of distribution of their work under some constraints. Obviously the devil is in the details, but at a high-level, I think that's a pretty mainstream, reasonable view.

cm127 12y ago
You missed the entire point. Software uses patents, so people literally can't imitate others' works like some artists do. And that's the problem with over-generalization: it's a useless abstraction that doesn't generalize well.
- macspoofing 12y ago
  >You missed the entire point. Software uses patents, I haven't, I just didn't focus on software patents because software patents are just one niche within the larger "Intellectual Property" framework. Even if you get rid of software patents, and I can be convinced either way, you're still left with patents in general, and copyright. >And that's the problem with over-generalization IP? I think it's a useful abstraction. Patents, software or otherwise, trademarks and copyright all are rooted in the same ideology. Giving a content creator a conditional exclusive right of distribution of a creative work.
  - cm127 12y ago
    You did miss the point. Read the article. It's about how all IP is not the same because they originated from different places and they do different things. For example, software uses patents. That's not just a niche, that's an entire category of IP. Copyright is also an entire category that artists use to "protect" their work. But what kind of protection? It's different between patent and copyright, so just saying I have IP rights, is as vague as you can possible be because you don't have them all - just some.

logicallee 12y ago

> The clearest way out of the confusion is to reject the term entirely. Not really - just like the clearest way to separate criminal and civil liability isn't to just stop using the word "illegal". The easiest way is to just learn the distinction. It doesn't take long. It takes about 30 seconds to explain intellectual property (copyright = exact original content, patent = protects a general mechanism, nobody can solve the same problem the same way, trademark = about consumer confusion, only one company can use a word or other thing to sell a specific type of product). Actually that was more like 15 seconds, wasn't it? I have absolutely no problem with calling all of the above intellectual property, because all of it keeps me from doing certain things, just like I'm not allowed to walk on some tiles just because they happen to be in the middle of my neighbor's house, and his property is protected by law. I'm not just referring to taking them - I can't even walk on them without his permission. Property rights are a fine expression. If it causes confusion, this can be cleared up directly. I just don't see the problem here.