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Comment by macspoofing | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

>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.

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.

> so just saying I have IP rights, is as vague as you can possible be

No, its not, because you could say "I have intangible personal property rights" or "I have personal property rights", or "I have property rights", each of which is vaguer than "I have IP rights", as IP is a strict subset of intangible personal property, which is itself a strict subset of personal property, etc.

"most people" are people that have grown up in a civilization that has some legal understanding of "intellectual property" and the economic effects thereof, so their intuition is already pretty skewed towards the status quo. Even if, after having experienced an alternative, they would prefer the alternative.

>"most people" are people that have grown up in a civilization that has some legal understanding of "intellectual property" and the economic effects thereof, so their intuition is already pretty skewed towards the status quo.

That may be so, but I still claim that there is something intuitive in supporting the idea that content creators be allowed to "own" their creative work. Doubly so if you live in a society that allows ownership (of things, or land), because it's a very short conceptual jump from one to the other.

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