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Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

The concept of IP is that that there is no concept of IP. Copyright is one thing and that's all that's being discussed here. Everything else that you might call "IP" is different, has different origins, works differently, and is entirely unrelated to trying to determine if someone copied another video deliberately.

We're not saying that some people should be allowed to confuse consumers by trying to pass off their products as someone else's products (those are trademarks) or that people shouldn't disclose all of the details of their inventions in exchange for a short monopoly on those inventions (that's patents), or that anyone should be allowed to say that their sparkling wine was prepared in Champagne, France (that's regional designation).

"IP" is a broad, vague term that describes different laws, with different purposes. Laws that are so different that it hardly makes sense to discuss them in the same breath.

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then the concept of copyright is dangerous to society

(could you really abolish copyright without bringing down the rest of IP protections with it?)

I think you could. It's completely different thing to have laws intended to not confuse consumers compared to laws intended to give authors exclusive reproductive rights over creative works (trademarks need not be creative or original at all, for example).

Ugh, this argument is tired and dumb. Thank you for bestowing upon us all the sacred knowledge that there are different kinds of IP, but we all already knew that, and choose to continue to refer to them, collectively, as IP, because they actually are similar in a lot of ways.

No, it's informed and clearheaded. We aren't well served by conflating trademarks (which, at their best, help with consumer protection via anti-fraudulence) with copyright infringement, or patent power. The similarities are far and few between, and mostly not relevant in any discussion. The term "intellectual property" is usually used by people trying to snow someone or someone who is confused about what's going on.

That there's confusion between the various concepts speaks to their similarities.

Copyright and patent are both intended to encourage innovation by providing the originator with a temporary monopoly on the use of works/processes/etc. Both are frequently discussed here in the context of large corporations/publishers using them to stifle the innovation they were designed to encourage.

Trademarks are often used in tandem with copyrights to protect a body of work in different ways - while "Steamboat Willy"s copyright will eventually expire (if it hasn't already), the trademark of the Mickey Mouse character will last indefinitely (so long as Disney protects it).

Distinctive trademarks are also commonly protected by design patents. Yes, they protect the work in different ways, but the two are related in their use and concept.

If you're so against collective terms, I hereby insist that you no longer refer to the "United States", or "European" culture. But I digress.

Patents are not intended to encourage innovation. Innovation happens all the time without patents. Patents are intended to abolish trade secrets! The bargain society offers with patents is tell us how you did it, because we know you're going to do it anyway. But if you tell us how, we promise to not compete with you for a short while.

If the trademark on Mickey Mouse were used forever, this doesn't mean we can't pass Steamboat Willie around. If its copyright expires, we can copy it, we can reproduce it, we can exhibit it, we can remix it; we just can't confuse the public into thinking we're Disney while we're doing any of this. If Disney thought it could prevent people from copying Steamboat Willie without copyrights, it wouldn't be lobbying for infinite copyright on it. The best Disney could do is make us state, in no ambiguous terms, "Mickey Mouse is a trademark of the Walt Disney Company" somewhere very prominent while we do whatever we want with Mickey.

A trademark doesn't mean that the trademarked thing is Lord Voldemort. Otherwise, every time we said "Microsoft" or "Apple" we'd be infringing. It just means that we might have trouble calling our OS "Hackintosh" or "Lindows", and even that's debatable in court (Microsoft was about to lose the Lindows case).

I like how you define the intention of patents but I am fairly sure that is not the intention in the law definition of patents. And while what you say is nice it simply doesn't work. Anything worth keeping as a trade secret and able to be kept secret will remain a trade secret regardless of the existence of the patent system.

It would be very interesting to live in a society where once a product is available on the market any trade secret on it is illegal and the only option is to have patents that you receive royalties for but you can not restrict their use.

> If you're so against collective terms, I hereby insist that you no longer refer to the "United States", or "European" culture.

that is being reductive. sufficiently so that you're basically straw-manning their point.

i would wager that, for example, extremely few people who view patents as negative (at least in this era), also view trademarks as negative.

IP = suitcase word (it contains any and all sort of meanings you can cram in).

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