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Comment by deathgrips | Hacker News Reader

>we're all on board with the idea of intellectual property actually being a thing now

No. Intellectual property is not genuine property. It is a state granted monopoly and is antithetical to free market principles.

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"Intellectual property" isn't a thing, "Intellectual Property Rights" are. They're not "antithetical to free market principles" if you accept that the "free market" requires regulation and that there are benefits to society by the cost of temporarily restricting free use with the subsequent benefit of ideas and expressions not being lost on the death/loss/bankruptcy etc of the IPR holder.

IPRs are (in general) things that are protected by law and open to licensing and civil suits for damages if used outside those laws and licenses:

* Trade Secrets and NDAs

* Copyrights

* Patents

* Trademarks

NDAs, etc. are contract law. Contracts need to be entered in without duress as they would be felonies otherwise. The others are societal contracts which operate much more akin to taxes from a philosophical point of view. But calling today's copyright law a temporary restriction is cynical at best.

Every government protection starts as a temporary relief. Then the corporations that benefit from those regulations use the extra revenue to lobby for more exclusively beneficial regulations that harm their competitors. The result is copyrights that last for infinity minus one years, infantile industries requiring temporary protections yet never leaving infancy, and regulatory boards staffed by CEOs from the industries they regulate. Copyright law, much like communism and eating ice cream for dinner every night, sounds good only in isolation without a historical perspective.

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