Reply to post: Property is theft

IP freely? What a wind-up! If only Trevor Baylis had patent protections inventors enjoy today

PyLETS
Stop

Property is theft

This article conflates and confuses 3 entirely separate property rights which have nothing to do with each other, other than the ridiculous grouping term "intellectual property" as if someone could "own" an idea.

The only natural property right is what a bandit, warlord or crook seizes by force and defends by force. That is how it was before the rule of law. In a democratic society law only works by consent of the governed, and if the public interest grants private property rights to be defended at public expense, the public interest requires compensation for the cost of this, both in relation to the cost of exclusion of those fenced out, and in relation to the cost to the public purse of maintaining legal boundaries around private property. If the land registry records your ownership of a plot of land with a dwelling on this, then you get to pay taxes to your local authority and that's how it should be.

Those claiming otherwise demand from us that those dispossessed subsidise the public cost of private property.

Copyright discussion has traditionally been one sided, due to the inability of politicians to oppose this uncompensated land grab by the man who buys ink by the barrel load and get elected.

Patents are good in the unusual and classic case of an inventive idea that no-one else would have been at all likely to have come up with. But most patents granted nowadays are nothing of the sort and are artificial monopolies maintained at the public expense, raising the price of any mildly innovative product for all of us. Patent offices make their money from patent applications and for applicants to continue to apply for these in large numbers a proportion of bad patents have to be granted making most patents bad. We've given the patent offices a license to print money, and given such a right who wouldn't run their printing press at full speed ?

The only one of these 3 areas of law which works in the public interest concerns trade marks. If John Smith has built a reputation at considerable effort and expense making and selling "John Smith Widgets" (TM), it's entirely reasonably that someone else shouldn't be able to adopt his name and pass off their inferior widgets as if they were his. This should and does not generally prevent another John Smith applying his name to a different trade.

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