[OS:N:] Does "Intellectual Property" beg the question?

Les Bell wrote:
> The term "intellectual property" is actually a fairly recent fashion. 

Richard Stallman essentially makes the point that the phrase 
"Intellectual Property" is a marketing term to beg the question of how 
patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets and a few other things 
should be treated. If you use that term, then it is unfortunately a 
no-brainer to assume "Intellectual Property" should be treated as 
property as opposed to something else. The cause of freedom is generally 
not served by using that term to discuss seperate items which are 
treated seperately by the law. See:
   http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html

It would be more accurate to call them "intellectual monopolies".

People who promote a term like "Intellectual Property" (as opposed to 
the rest of us who often throw around such a term to try to sound 
sophisticated and knowledgeable, and I was guilty of using it that way 
for a while myself) often try to rig the political landscape of laws to 
work in their favor through political influence that has little to do 
with "promoting the general welfare...".

For example if patents, trademarks, trade secrets, trademarks, etc. were 
really like "real estate" why are they not taxed annually based on a 
self-assessed public domain buyout value?
   http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=889
Clearly patents, trademarks, etc. impose a burden on society like real 
property as they are monopolies which cost society money to enforce 
(police, prisons, judiciary, chilling effects, judiciary, registration, 
record keeping, etc.) yet rightholders do not have to directly pay most 
of these costs which their monopolies create for society. And now that 
copyrights no longer go into the public domain in practice, the part of 
the bargain for copyrights that said copyrighted material entering the 
public domain somehow justified this process is now completely broken in 
the US.

In general, somewhat similar sorts of advertising spins were made by 
slave holders to argue their "fundamental human right" to hold property 
(i.e. keep and breed human slaves like livestock, including sometimes 
their own children) were in danger of being violated by talk of 
abolition of slavery. Sadly, many US citizens, including some blacks, 
supported slavery as a concept in hopes they too would become slave 
holders (in general, only a small minority of relatively wealthy US 
citizens in the 1800s actually owned slaves).
   http://www.issues-views.com/index.php/sect/23000/article/23018

While obviously the human suffering by both slaves and slaveholders (who 
were turned themselves into beasts by the practice) is not equivalent to 
what goes on under copyright, there are parallels. For example, millions 
of people in Africa are dying annually of curable diseases because of 
drug patents making drugs inaccessible financially. Common medical 
problems worldwide (malaria, river blindness) are not being addressed 
significantly by drug researchers who focus mainly on "me too" clones of 
financially succesful drugs (e.g. the next Viagra). We spend time 
discussing this issue instead of creating more free content and more 
free software.

I think it is a fair question (though maybe offtopic for this list) to 
talk about patents, copyrights, trademarks etc. and the fundamental 
human rights of both rightsholders to earn a return on investment and 
and licensed property users for fair use, but only as long as we then 
also discuss the whole picture related to "intellectual monopolies":
* billions of people in poverty,
* the widening gap between rich and poor,
* the failure of the computer industry to spread innovative concepts 
rapidly (e.g. Memex (1940s), Smalltalk (1970s), IBM's VM (1960s), or QNX 
(early 1980s), which only now decades later have become widespread in 
somewhat crippled forms in HTML and the Web, Java and Windows, the 
Common Language Runtime, and [ducks, even though I use it preferrably] 
GNU/Linux).
* the potential impending imprisonment of millions of US citizens for 
copyright violations based on laws passed in the last few years and 
related stress on society even now,
* the chilling effects of works not produced or time wasted determing 
who owns the rights to something for creation of a derivative work, etc.

--Paul Fernhout

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