IP policy is an intrinsic and harmful byproduct of capitalism, like inequality. IP exists to legally protect a competitive advantage in the marketplace, making

IP policy is an intrinsic and harmful byproduct of capitalism, like inequality. IP exists to legally protect a competitive advantage in the marketplace, making it indispensable to anyone in the marketplace. every capitalist is incentivized to act in defense of current IP laws, because their continued success in the marketplace is based on their control of IP. considering the people defending IP policy are largely the ones controlling the lion's share of capital, they correspondingly have a much greater amount of power to dictate IP policy in every arena, from the legal to the legislative. this is an intractable problem. information is just an abstract form of capital. at the heart of it, success in capitalism is about consolidating as much capital as you can. it follows that information will be consolidated as much as possible, and this problem will only get worse as time goes on. since we all need money to fulfill our basic and higher-level needs, our economic systems directly drive our collective behavior. since capitalism is based on competition, this means our collective behavior is always going to be driven towards individualism. as we have seen, when we have problems that require behaviors not incentivized by the economy, such as cooperation - climate change, biodiversity, etc - we instantly hit a brick wall and find that cooperation is impossible. we see companies continuing to steamroll ahead with oil drilling and such in the face of huge disasters, not because anyone is evil, but because everyone is doing their job. i don't know what the solution is, and i am not advocating any other economic paradigm over capitalism. but i think we need to take several steps back and ask ourselves if our best heuristic for determining the behavior of human societies is: "move capital around as efficiently as possible." and i'm not even touching the fact that laissez-faire capitalism optimizes for inequality. chicago and austrian school commenters: come at me, bro.