> But the concept of IP does not seem fundamentally wrong to me.
Let me ask you this, what if in addition to paying for the scarce materials and scarce intangibles that make up a house, you had to pay a license for using the idea of a “house” to people who had inherited a patent on the concept of a house from their ancestor who was the first person who had been documented to leave caves and live in an adobe hooch? And then you had to pay another license to people who held a patent on indoor plumbing, etc. etc. Because of all these i.p. licenses suppose tour house cost an 100x or 1000x the cost of materials and no one could afford housing, but your employer was such a good guy that they just compensated you with a benefit where as long as you worked there, they would pay for housing, and the value of this benefit approached and often exceeded monetary compensation. And any time people criticized the arrangement, we were told that the inventors of homes and bathrooms needed to be compensated or no one would have bothered to invent homes or indoor plumbing and if it weren’t for licenses we would all still be living in caves and defecating in slit trenches. If this seems ridiculous then perhaps you can see why some people think its ridiculous that the same system applies to copyrights on media and patents on medicines.
> But the concept of IP does not seem fundamentally wrong to me.
Let me ask you this, what if in addition to paying for the scarce materials and scarce intangibles that make up a house, you had to pay a license for using the idea of a “house” to people who had inherited a patent on the concept of a house from their ancestor who was the first person who had been documented to leave caves and live in an adobe hooch? And then you had to pay another license to people who held a patent on indoor plumbing, etc. etc. Because of all these i.p. licenses suppose tour house cost an 100x or 1000x the cost of materials and no one could afford housing, but your employer was such a good guy that they just compensated you with a benefit where as long as you worked there, they would pay for housing, and the value of this benefit approached and often exceeded monetary compensation. And any time people criticized the arrangement, we were told that the inventors of homes and bathrooms needed to be compensated or no one would have bothered to invent homes or indoor plumbing and if it weren’t for licenses we would all still be living in caves and defecating in slit trenches. If this seems ridiculous then perhaps you can see why some people think its ridiculous that the same system applies to copyrights on media and patents on medicines.