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[parent] [thread] 2 comments
1. ramble+(OP)[view] [source] 2023-05-10 14:43:17
I'm not sure arguing for a company to rest on its laurels and keep feeding of an IP from 100 years ago is an argument for creativity and innovation.
replies(1): >>ejb999+vc
2. ejb999+vc[view] [source] 2023-05-10 15:34:21
>>ramble+(OP)
but is it much different that descendants living off the interest and dividends of some large sum of money that their great-great grandparents accumulated a few hundred years ago?

To me it is pretty much the same thing - not a fan of nepo-kids living off of trust funds they didn't earn - but if you are going to fix one problem, you should try to fix all of the almost identical ones at the same time and not get upset that disney is still making money off of something they created 100 years ago, and not be upset about kennedy's, rockefellers, and the like still living of the money their great-greats generated a hundred years ago.

replies(1): >>readbe+nr
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3. readbe+nr[view] [source] [discussion] 2023-05-10 16:38:40
>>ejb999+vc
It would be similar if "intellectual property" was property in the same sense in which a table or a vast amount of money is property. However, it is not.

Normal property ownership is something we use to manage scarcity that already exists—that there is only one of something, and we have to decide where it will go and who will be able to decide how it is used. Intellectual property, by contrast, creates artificial scarcity by means of a government-enforced monopoly (in the case of copyright, the monopoly is on the right to produce a copy of a work).

It is unfortunate (and perhaps not accidental) that we settled on the term "intellectual property" as opposed to something more descriptive like "intellectual monopoly." "Intellectual property" encourages equivocating such monopolies with normal property, a mistake that tends to muddle debates on the subject.

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