To Own Ideas

This is the script of the video available at https://youtu.be/yDlKxVjzYvU

In 1989, the US government accused multiple countries of infringing on intellectual property.
Americans wanted them to crack down on piracy and recognize more patents, claiming that infringement
is not only harmful to the US, it undermines creativity itself [1].

But these countries were not just greedily copying foreign technology, they had very good reasons to
reject patents. In India, domestic manufacturers had less resources to dedicate to
research and couldn't file as many patent applications as foreign companies; its market became
dominated by foreign firms and India had to buy medicine at high prices [2]. In 1970, the Indian
government eliminated some types of patents, which lifted monopolies and allowed Indian companies to
make more affordable medicine [3]. A bit too affordable to some tastes.

Is it legitimate to own ideas in the same way that we can own objects, even when human lives are at
stake? You could say yes: ideas can be expensive to come up with and rewarding creators can boost
innovation. You could also say no: gatekeeping ideas aggravates inequalities and can hinder
innovation. Depending on whom you ask, you will get vastly different answers, and with an
increasingly connected global economy and technological progress, I want to assess if intellectual
property, IP for short, is actually a positive thing. To make sense out of all this, I'll present
its history, its alternatives, and its possible future. And if I do a good job, maybe I'll make up
my own mind.

I. History

But first, history. People have tried to protect their ideas for a long time, and two main
strategies have emerged for that.

The oldest one is secrecy: if you keep ideas within a group, other people have no way of copying
them. For example, Polynesian navigators knew how to travel safely between islands in the Pacific
Ocean by observing stars, birds, waves, and clouds [4]. These techniques are taught openly now, but
back in the days, navigators kept that expertise for themselves because it gave them control over
travel [5]. Other secrets are more difficult to contain. Miserere Mei Deus is a piece of music
composed in 1638 that the Church kept exclusive for more than a century by running after anyone who
tried to leak and publish the sheet music, until 14 year-old Mozart heard it in the Vatican and
transcribed it from memory, essentially pirating 15 minutes of music from the Pope [6]. Secrets are
sensitive to leaks and often impractical.

The other solution to protect ideas is regulation: you disclose your ideas to the public, but a
central authority grants a monopoly on the use of those ideas. That's pretty old; inventors in
medieval Venice would obtain monopolies on their inventions through letters patent [7], derived from
a Latin word for "open" [8]. Letters patent were literally "open" legal documents that granted
specific rights or monopolies [9] and their biggest weakness was that they were regional. Venicians
made the best mirrors in the 17th century through a very toxic process that often killed craftsmen
within 10 years of work. They could command high prices because no other country knew how to make
good mirrors at that time, but they had no way to enforce monopolies in other countries if their
techniques leaked. That's why Venice would threaten workers with the death penalty if they wanted
leave the republic [10]. Another problem with letters patent is that they were somewhat arbitrary.
Chocolate had been known in America for millenia and was introduced in Europe by the Spanish, but a
Parisian royal officer was given a 29-year monopoly on it in France even though he hadn't invented
anything [11]. Eventually, patents spread out to most countries and governments set up patent
offices to formalize the registration of inventions [12] [13]. They have to meet certain criteria,
like novelty and usefulness, they are evaluated by professionals, and inventors have to pay fees; if
everything's good, they get a temporary monopoly on that idea in the country of registration [14].

Copyright is another type of IP regulation that covers creative work. That concept didn't exist in
ancient times; people could copy and resell books without compensating authors [15]. Books were
copied manually and expensive, but printing made them way more affordable. Ideas started propagating
much faster and authorities in China [16] and Europe reacted by creating censorship laws to control
books they considered dangerous; the Catholic Church even maintained a list of prohibited books
until 1966 [17]. These laws evolved into copyright, gradually giving more rights to authors; for
example the Statute of Anne in Great Britain gave explicit copyright to authors as opposed to
publishers [18]. Contrarily to patents, you don't have to register for copyright, work is protected
the moment it is created and lasts your lifetime plus multiple decades [19]. That's great for
creators but it makes it easier to hike prices. For example, books were much less expensive in
Germany than Great Britain in 19th century because Germans didn't bother with copyright laws at that
time [20].

Trademark is another form of IP that protects the identity of a brand with reserved names or
images that others cannot to use without authorization. Similar systems have existed since ancient
times in multiple civilizations [158], but modern trademarks and registration offices got set up in
the 19th century. A trademark cannot be purely descriptive [23], and they cannot be generic;
"trampoline" used to be a valid trademark but it was so often used that it became a generic word
[24]. If you hold a valid trademark, no one else is allowed to use it and impersonate your brand.
For example, the word "ping-pong" is a registered trademark [22], so high-profile events use "table
tennis" instead to avoid getting sued.

Trade secrets protect confidential information. They are legally recognized, so employers are
allowed to make their employees sign non-disclosure agreements [27]. My favorite trade secret is
from KFC, which stores its original recipe in a vault and hires two contractors to mix half the
ingredients and make sure that no one has the full recipe at any time [28]. But secrets are brittle,
and no matter how carefully you conceal them, there's always a risk that some guy from Appalachia
reveals the recipe to the whole world [29]. Trade secrets are used a lot by tech companies: search
engine algorithms and AI models are often hidden from public view [30].

There are two big trends in the history of intellectual property. First, creators were gradually
given more rights because it is seen as a way to reward their work. Copyright [32] and patent terms
[33] were extended over time and new types of IP emerged. For example, electronic circuits used not
to be covered by intellectual property, but Intel complained to the US government that it could
spend millions of dollars developing new chips and, once they hit the market, competitors could copy
and undersell them [31]. So the government created a new form of IP to protect their chips [166].
The other big historical trend is homogenization. If different countries use different IP
frameworks, people can just go to the most permissive legislation to circumvent monopolies, so
creators demand their rights to be harmonized across countries. Multiple international agreements,
like the Berne convention on copyright [34] and the Paris convention on patents [87] have done that.
Nowadays, the World Trade Organization requires its member states to sign the TRIPS agreement, which
enforces strict, uniform IP regulations [35].

IP has become stronger over time, and there is more than what we've seen. Industrial designs protect
the appearance of products [36]. Appellations of origin protect products tied to recognized cultural
practices [37]. Plant varieties can also be protected [38]. There's this general agreement that IP
is a good thing; it's even part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [39]. But just because
something is popular doesn't mean we cannot question it. After all, patents paywall life-saving
medicine. You could also say that research for life-saving medicine would not have been funded in
the first place without patents. I could make an entire list of pros and cons, but I don't find that
useful because we cannot change IP without rethinking how creators get paid. Instead of asking "is
IP good or bad", I wanna ask: "are there viable alternatives to our current IP framework and do they
have concrete advantages over what we have now". Several political movements have thought of such
alternatives, so let's talk about them. Now REMEMBER, I'm not defending these political movements or
trying to brainwash you, I'm just explaining how they handle IP.

II. Alternatives

II.I. Communism

The first movement we'll see is communism, now bear with me, it's not a model on how to run the
economy, but it did implement pretty big changes in IP laws, so it's an interesting point of
comparison. Communists want to abolish private property. Factories, railways, ports, any
asset used for production would be collectively owned because, according to Marx, inequalities
amplify to untenable levels if only rich people control them. But communists don't to abolish
personal property, items for individual use [40]. Intellectual property is incompatible with
communism because it's a form of private property: it turns knowledge into monopolies that people
are charged money for using. However, copyright, in art for instance, was often seen as less
exploitative, so it was more commonly accepted during transition to communism [41].

Soon after the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, they abolished patents. On ideological grounds, but
also for practical reasons: they had devised a centrally planned economy. Handing out temporary
monopolies to inventors doesn't make sense when the government manages the economy, like who are
they going to protect their inventions from? There were no competitors. But the government did care
about rewarding inventors, so it introduced a new mechanism called avtorskiye svidetel'stva,
author's certificates. People would register their inventions at government offices and the state
would use them without restriction. Rather than getting monopolies, inventors would get paid,
receive better housing, or promotions at their jobs [41]. Soviet companies could also hold
trademarks, but individuals could not apply for them [42]. Copyright was handled differently:
authors preserved ownership of their creations, but they could not freely sell them because the
economy was centrally planned. The government decided what would be printed and the value of, say, a
text, was determined by its length and genre rather than how much money people were willing to pay
for it. Copyright was also more permissive than in the West, it was legal to translate books without
asking permission from right holders [41]. Communists believed states would eventually dissolve into
a stateless, egalitarian society, and IP would have also faded away during that transition [161],
but things went the other way.

First, the soviets reintroduced patents in 1924 to facilitate trade with other countries [43]. This
is not a unique case, the Netherlands, which have never been communist, also got rid of patents and
brought 'em back after caving in to the pressure of their trading partners [44]. Copyright and
trademark protections also got stronger over time: as the USSR joined international partnerships, it
had to adopt stricter IP regulations as part of the deals and they became more and more similar to
their Western counterpart [41] [42]. And on a more fundamental level, centrally planned economies
were not a success. They did pull off very impressive feats [45] [46] [47] [48], but they lagged
behind in fields neglected by government planners, like electronics [49] and consumer goods [50].
Communist countries shifted their focus on productivity [51] [52] and transitioned to markets or
dropped out of communism entirely [53]. They also integrated into the global economy; that means
signing intellectual property agreements. China used to have an IP regime comparable to that of the
USSR; as it began trading with Western countries, it adopted stricter IP laws and it now protects IP
efficiently [54].

Another problem with centrally planned economies is that progress is difficult to plan ahead.
Ozempic was developed thanks to lizard venom research [55]. GPUs that power AI models were
originally developed for gaming [56]. Bureaucrats managing the economy from ivory towers have a hard
time predicting how apparently unrelated fields combine into new innovations; decentralized decision
making, in a market let's say, is better at this. BUT even in capitalist countries, collective
actions coordinated by governments have contributed to innovation, especially for large-scale
projects that don't have immediate commercial applications, like the Internet [57], geopositioning
[58], genomics [59]. Since public organizations are not motivated by profit, they generally care
less about copyright. NASA [61] lets us use most of their images for free. The fully annotated human
genome has been publicly available for years [62]. Competition AND collaboration have mutually
contributed to technological progress; some shortcomings of the soviet economy can be attributed to
its lack of competition. Now let's see what happens when we go exactly the other way.

II.II. Libertarians

Libertarianism is a political movement that holds freedom as the most important value [63]. Not
unlimited freedom because we would end up in the Purge; libertarians think it must be limited by the
non-aggression principle [63]: don't "harm another in life, health, liberty, or possessions" [64].
This is not a novel idea. It's in the Bible [65] and it has been rephrased to no end [64]. The
distinguishing feature of libertarianism is that it opposes coercion. No one likes to pay taxes, but
most people see it as necessary to have public schools and fire departments. Libertarians argue that
those things should be voluntarily funded, that we should not be forced into paying for them. They
argue against non-essential state interventions; that means legalizing drugs, making immigration
highly permissive, letting people carry, ending welfare, opposing military interventions [63] [162].
It's this meme, essentially [66]. Most libertarians want to transition from a strong state to a
minimal state responsable to enforce the non-aggression principle with courts and police; that's
called minarchism [67]. A minority wants to abolish the state entirely and let markets do
everything; that's called anarcho-capitalism [68].

With that said you might guess that libertarians want to abolish big government-controlled offices
handing out patents and copyright, but it's not really the case because most libertarians regard IP
as a valid form of property that should be protected under the non-aggression principle [69] [70].
Ayn Rand, yes I know she didn't like libertarians, calling them a "monstrous, disgusting bunch of
people" [71], but her ideas have inspired libertarians [72] and continue to influence them to this
day [73] [74]; she said that creators should be given IP protections because mental efforts deserve
to be rewarded somehow. She emphasized those protections should be temporary, otherwise they would
paralyze the market [75]. That's true: there's a practice called patent evergreening often used in
the pharmaceutical industry. Patents are generally limited to 20 years, but companies can register
new related patents to artificially lengthen their monopolies. This is legal but it undermines
competition [76] [83]. Some libertarians do not even see IP as a valid form of property because they
point out it requires infringing on the freedom of consumers, by forbidding them to copy books for
instance [77]. Libertarians don't have a consensus on IP because they disagree on how big the state
should be and on what qualifies as property, but they generally agree that criminal sanctions for
piracy should be abolished because it's a victimless crime. Now let's see what libertarian
politicians do about this.

Javier Milei, an "anarcocapitalista en la teoría y minarquista en la práctica" [78], adopted some
reforms to liberalize the Argentinian economy. In 2025, he deregulated the sociedades de gestión
colectiva, which are state-approved organizations acting as intermediaries between creators and
consumers of copyrighted material. Instead of having to go through them, creators now can sign deals
directly with clients, which is more similar to how things work in North America [79]. But Milei's
government has not signaled any intention of modifying copyright or patent laws themselves. Even if
he wanted to, he would have to convince the World Trade Organization not to retaliate, good luck
with that. Elsewhere, the Canadian Libertarian Party used to propose reviewing existing IP
regulation [80], but its current platform does not mention IP anymore [81]. The US Libertarian party
does not proposes any change to IP laws [82]. They either don't care or don't think it's realistic
to change them.

A lot of people are misappropriating the word libertarian, but actual libertarianism is currently
not that popular. One explanation for that is most people think collective action is the best
solution to collective problems. Thalidomide is a medication used to treat cancer and other diseases
that causes birth defects when pregnant women take it. In the 1950s it got approved in most European
countries and caused complications on thousands of babies, but the US was largely exempt because the
FDA investigator assigned to it wanted proof that it was safe to fetal development and never
received any [88]. Governments reinforced their validation mechanisms to avoid similar cases in the
future, but libertarians argue those amplify the problem because they complicate competition and
prevent markets and civil lawsuits from resolving these issues. Here's one example: in 2015, Turing
Pharmaceuticals hiked the price of Daraprim from 13 dollars 50 cents to 750 dollars. That drug had
been approved by the FDA in 1953 and the patents have long expired, but no generic was available
because, long story short, competitors didn't think it would be profitable to get generics approved
by the FDA. It was not an IP problem; regulations favored that monopoly - inadvertently [86]. So
yeah, regulation loopholes do harm consumers and we have to patch them, but without regulations we'd
still have asbestos [84] [85], ozone layer depletion [89], DDT [90], lead paint [91]. Markets were
not quick enough to address those; time for another alternative.

II.III. Anarchism

Anarchism is a political movement that aims at abolishing unjust hierarchies [92]. That means no
state and no regulated markets, just people voluntarily self-organizing. People started proposing
that in the 19th century [93] [94] [122] and they have been... successively crushed [95] [96] [97].
There are some exceptions, the Zapatista rebel movement in Chiapas, Mexico, although it does not
label itself as anarchist, has some characteristics of that movement, like direct democracy,
collective services, promotion of indigenous rights [98], but its economy is fairly small and it
struggles to repress organized violence [99] [165]. This model has not been transposed to larger
societies and it's hard to imagine how global supply chains and high technology could work without
markets or regulations [100]. Anarchist positions have not become mainstream but they contributed to
worker's unions [121] and influenced subcultures a lot.

Punk artists were anti-establishment. They created independent labels, organized their own concerts,
criticized power [101], made their own publications [102]. They relied on local communities, so they
didn't need or care about copyright protections. But as punk music became more popular and
commercially viable, some artists signed with mainstream labels, buying into the very system they
were criticizing [103]. Sellouts were met with harsh criticism, the band Crass going as far as
saying that punk was dead in 1979 [104]. Many such cases: ballroom culture [106] was appropriated by
rainbow capitalism [107]. Breaking [108] ended up at the Olympics [109]. This isn't all bad, I'm
sure a ton of stuck-up people began appreciating hip hop after seeing it alongside preppy stuff. But
the original meaning is often lost in the appropriation, and that can reinforce the power it
criticizes.

This is especially relevant in technology. The open source community traces its origin to college
campuses and tech enthusiasts who created their own software instead of relying on companies [110].
Some had very strong positions against copyright and censorship: the Declaration of the Independence
of Cyberspace [111], written in 1996 by a guy who wrote lyrics for a punk singer [112], claims that
the Internet ought to remain free of any government interference. "Information wants to be free" was
the word of the day for many [113]. Others, like Linus Torvalds, developer of the Linux kernel, have
more compromising views and are willing to use proprietary software [114]. While open source
projects have become increasingly impactful, the subculture that created them has been appropriated
by tech giants that rely on unpaid labor [115] and use hacker imagery for marketing campaigns [116].
At the same time, companies contribute to open source, paying their employees to maintain it [117]
[118]. The idealistic view is that people just freely collaborate, but everyone has to get paid.
Open source contributors either work on open source for free and have a day job, or receive
donations, or monetize documentation and other add-ons, or accept contributions from tech giants.
This tension is especially obvious with OpenAPI, which was set up to create transparent AI to the
benefit of everyone but relies on increasingly shady business practices [119].

Anarchists have trouble gaining power because they oppose power in the first place, but there will
always be people who create work without expecting to get paid [120] and who give money to creators
even if they are not forced to [168]. Although subcommunities can and do function without IP, that
doesn't necessarily mean it would work in large, diverse societies. But some people are willing to
give it a try.

II.IV. Pirate Parties

Pirate parties are political parties active in multiple countries that defend digital rights. The
first one started in January 2006, in Sweden, of course [123]. It got a boost in popularity later
that year when the Swedish police raided The Pirate Bay [124], an unaffiliated website that
facilitates torrenting. Which is illegal! The guys who ran that site were sent on trial and then
sent to prison after being found guilty of copyright infringement [125]. The media [126] and
political figures [127] agreed with that decision, but a lot of people disagreed and rallied around
the pirate party. Other pirate parties were set up elsewhere and even reached the European
parliament [128]. They tend focus on decreasing copyright and patent terms, reducing sentences for
infringement, advocating for more freedom of expression and government transparency. They address
excessive authority from the state and private companies [129].

Pirate parties have to reconcile ideology with reality. A lot of their members point out that ideas
are non-rivalrous and non-scarce [130]. Copying them does not prevent their creators from continuing
to use these ideas, so they argue infringement should not be seen as morally bad. Others argue that,
without IP, there would be fewer ideas to copy because people would have less incentive to create
them. That is, a lot of these non-rivalrous ideas exist because of IP. That's difficult to prove
empirically because the whole planet operates under a pretty uniform IP framework. Some researchers
conclude that patents increase R&D investment [131], others point out that strengthening patents
does not affect investment for some types of research [132]. You could also say that people would
create anyway without financial incentive and that IP is thus superfluous [133], but a lot of great
work has been created because their authors had the means to commit full time to it [134], and were
motivated by the prospect of success. The WTO will also watch closely if any pirate party tries to
change IP law in any way, so reforms would be difficult.

The original program of the Swedish pirate party called for the abolition of all pharmaceutical
patents and proposed to drive research with government funding instead [135]. The current version is
different, saying that IP should be granted when it has "well-documented positive effects" [129],
and you can interpret it the way you want. This idea that work traditionally rewarded with IP should
be, instead, paid by the government, is quite popular among pirate parties. They often defend
universal basic income, or UBI, that's when the government gives a baseline salary to everyone
[136]. It's getting more and more talked about with automation, and if it ever becomes widespread,
it would probably change the concept of copyright because creators would no longer depend on it to
earn money. They would still want to be recognized as authors and not plagiarized though, so IP
would not disappear entirely I think. UBI has never been tried on a large scale. We don't know how
to do it and how it would impact consumption habits or productivity [137]. In Ireland, some artists
are getting paid by the government in a kind of limited UBI [138]. This is not an initiative of a
pirate party and it's not actually UBI, but it's the kind of thing they support.

III. The Future

With all that said, it's time to wonder how intellectual property will change in the future.

III.I. The Same IP Mechanisms Will Remain

Kurzum, there a three main ways to handle intellectual property. The first is private ownership, the
state gives monopolies to creators. The second is collective ownership, the state gives money to
creators through taxes and the ideas remain free. The third, I'll call 无为 (wúwéi), the state
doesn't intervene at all; ideas are created without people getting monopolies or money. The dominant
IP regime of our time is private ownership, but the other two are also relevant; think of public
research and open source. Pirate parties have been trying to reduce ownership in favor of the other
two, but more than twenty years later, they have... failed to do this. A big reason why people don't
rally behind them is that most people support IP to some extend, and believe creators deserve to be
rewarded instead of letting everyone free-ride their work. I know a ton of people disagree, but this
is the mainstream view. Another reason for that failure is reforming IP is incredibly hard. It's a
framework that spans the entire planet. Before changing things up, a majority of countries would
have to agree on how to change it. Given all that, intellectual property will probably not go away
in the next decades, but alternative models will continue to challenge this dominant regime.

III.II. Monopolies Would Exist Even Without IP

A point I wanna discuss is monopolization. In the pharmaceutical industry especially, patents do
empower companies to hike prices [139]. But monopolies emerge through other processes. Amazon
undersells competitors by dynamically adjusting its prices until they go bankrupt. Short term, this
is good for consumers; competition drives prices down, but once the competitor goes under, the
prices go back up, and if another competitor shows up, it will be defeated the same way. Tech
companies maintain an illusion of competition [140] and can also pressure consumers. Apple
inconveniences its users and third-party developers when they try alternatives to keep them locked
on its platform [141]. Nvidia uses vertical integration to reinforce its position on the market
[167]. Marketing manipulates consumers. Paracetamol, also called acetaminophen, was discovered in
the 19th century and was applied to medicine in the mid 20th century. It's inexpensive and its basic
form is free of patent, you can find it on shelves for cheap. But pharmaceutical companies have
realized they can sell it for more money if they bombard consumers with advertisement. Most people
don't know Tylenol is mostly just paracetamol, but they are willing to pay way more than its
manufacturing cost just because of brand recognition. This is information asymmetry. Consumers will
never be as knowledgeable as manufacturers, so they can bet on their ignorance and charge more than
a fair price [142]. Retail companies and airlines [143] are using, or plan to use, surveillance to
charge more money dynamically, which reduces transparency. So, would monopolies and crappy market
practices evaporate if IP is weakened or abolished? Absolutely not, this is how the system works.

III.III. Progress Will Make IP Evolve

One thing I can predict is that our definition of property will continue to evolve. Biopiracy is the
misappropriation of traditional knowledge, when pharmaceutical companies, for instance, create new
products from medicinal plants used by indigenous people. The World Intellectual Property
Organization adopted a treaty in 2024 to combat biopiracy by forcing companies to acknowledge
traditional knowledge. This had been proposed by Columbia in 1999 and indigenous groups had to fight
to have their rights recognized, but social progress eventually came around [147]. International
organizations also acknowledged that medicine should be affordable [145] and that copyrighted
material should be more easily accessible to disabled people [146]. This is all far from perfect,
but international treaties can be improved. If you have time. Scientific progress will also
challenge IP laws. For example, some experimental brain implants are used to manage epilepsy. The
manufacturer owns the device, so when it goes bankrupt, the implant has to get removed, even if the
patient wants to keep it. Some people have pointed out that the implant and its software should be
considered part of the patient's body, and that their body autonomy should prime over ownership laws
[144]. So implants and other new technologies could challenge our existing IP laws in the future.

III.IV. AI Changes IP But Does Not Make It Obsolete

We've now arrived at the inevitable AI segment. There are two opposing views on generative models.
A: models create new data in a process similar to how humans are inspired by artworks. B: models
simply reshuffles memorized data. We need more research into interpretability to understand what's
going on; we already have some results that support either view [148] [149] and you can select
whichever you prefer depending on your biases and business interests. But even if this is genuine
creativity, AI model outputs will remain non-copyrightable because IP is meant to reward human
creativity [150], that's why this image will remain in public domain [151]. Another argument is that
humans themselves are not truly creative and just reshuffle previously seen data, like LLMs...
you're free to believe that but artificial neural networks do not work like human brains. They don't
have subjective experiences. At least the current ones don't. And they don't have interests,
unlike artists who kind of need copyright. Another issue is that most tech companies are making
money with models trained on unpaid material. In some cases, like open source software, developers
add licenses that explicitly allow using their projects to train AI models, so there's no concern
here. The problem is when companies use copyrighted images and books. The authors never consented to
this. You can argue it's fair use, but a lot of people disagree. Of course, no one expects tech
CEOs to care about consent. Also, code generation is actually useful whereas image generation is
not. Debates are far from over, but we can already say that tech companies will keep trying to erode
the rights of users and creators while reinforcing their own rights [152].

IV. What I Think of All This

What I think of all this: I think a lot of things.

IP is not going away because most people think it's a good thing. Creators need to get paid, and in
capitalist economies, the public prefers giving them monopolies over tax money. Not rewarding
creators at all is seen as immoral by most people. Some say that IP is just a relic of a time whence
the economy was not free, that it's just a legal fiction, but IP keeps getting stronger. It's not a
cosmic accident, it's the natural consequence of an economic system based on private property: if
you work on something, you wanna get paid for it, even if the result is intangible. Of course, if we
set up another economic system in which creators are rewarded fairly without IP, then its abolition
would be a natural consequence. But it won't happen under this system. We've all seen theoretical
arguments on this topic for years, and public support to weaken IP has not changed. Things will stay
that way as long as no alternative is set up. That's why the proposals of pirate parties to fund
public research and UBI are more appealing than defending piracy, they are about replacing IP with
something else instead of scrapping it altogether. But would swapping patents for public research
really be an improvement? Is UBI truly viable? I think these ideas are worth trying out. Another
issue is that the international community would have to reach a consensus on loosening up IP
regulations, that sounds even more difficult.

My main issue on this topic is not with IP itself, it's with power. Governments have often sided
with companies rather than consumers, like when drafting the semiconductor act. International
organizations take forever to make simple decisions. Tech companies rely on secrecy, surveillance,
and evergreening to extract as much wealth as they can from the working class. The US Supreme Court
has made sketchy rulings, deciding in 2013 that, while genes cannot be patented, complementary
DNA can be [153], which biologists have described as scientifically inconsistent [154]. You know
who delivered the opinion of the court? Clarence Thomas [155]. You know what's one of his favorite
book? Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand [156]. The idea behind IP is that the state gives temporary
monopolies to reward creativity, but when people hack the system through lobbying, or companies
exert excessive power over consumers, or incompetent government officials misinterpret science, that
social contract is breached and ingenuity gets rewarded less than trickery. The best we can do to
counter this is, I think, to decentralize power. That means more democratic representation, less
surveillance, rulers kept in check with effective counter-powers, laws that reflect the interests of
everyone. The way we can do that is by uniting over causes that benefit everyone, like supporting
other workers, using open source software, investing in public research, pressuring policymakers
against evergreening.

When an idea is unpopular, it's not always because the public is ignorant or misguided, it's often
because it's just not a good idea. Reality is: intellectual property is the imperfect mechanism
we've developed over centuries to balance out the interests of creators with those of users. It is
flawed because our societies are inefficient and power is too centralized; that is what needs to
change first.

References

Image References

II. Alternatives

II.I. Communism

II.II. Libertarianism

II.III. Anarchism

II.IV. Pirate Parties

IV.

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Another Thought

There are huge differences in how people define IP and in what regulations they consider fair. In
Germany, a court ruled last year that it's illegal to use "Dubai chocolate" for products that do not
come from Dubai because it could mislead consumers (the same logic applies to feta cheese and other
products), but in North America, most people believe freedom to call you products whatever you want
is more important than uplifting local traditions. Unsuccessful inventors are against patents until
they get lucky and create something new; then they seek IP rights. Authors are likely to defend
copyright; youtubers who criticize movies are more likely to be in favor of weakening it. Our
culture, values, and interests shape how we understand things like "ownership" and "freedom", we
will never have universal definitions for them.

The alternative systems I've presented all come with their own definition of these words. A lot of
people agree with some observations made by Marx but strongly reject abolition private property
because it clashes with their idea that freedom depends on one's possessions. Libertarianism often
weirds people out because it is dismissive of non-priviledged people. In theory, people who cannot
work could live off charity only, but they would face more hardship than if a state supported them.
A lot of people consider a society to be civilized only if it has the capacity to care for everyone,
and pure individualism is not good at this in practice. I'm not a relativist. There are opinions
that we must all reject, particularly hateful ones. But a free society must accomodate a variety of
viewpoints; asking everyone to adopt the same definitions does not respect their individuality.
That's why I'm skeptical of perfect-in-theory systems.