There Are No Good Arguments for Intellectual Property (2010)

I wonder how the author would feel about me copying & pasting their article to a few different websites (such as Medium.com), and then collecting both the financial proceeds & the credit.

This post is really low quality. The author has made no serious effort to articulate the arguments in favor of intellectual property.

The argument for patents is simple and clear: the alternative is broader use of trade secrets. In a patent regime, a company can (indeed must) publish their process, in exchange for a temporary monopoly on exploiting it commercially. In return, everyone else can learn it, implement it for research, and improve it, at which point the patent no longer applies.

Copyright was also compelling in the technological milieu in which it was invented. Without it, the profit earned on a piece of writing goes entirely to the publisher, which is exploitative. I'm of the opinion that zero-cost copying has punctured this pretty thoroughly, and that the ludicrous extension of the term of copyright has further undermined the justice of the practice.

If given a choice between the IP laws we have, and no IP laws at all, I'd take the latter. But these arguments for patents and copyright aren't some clever thing I came up with: they're the basic justification for that area of law, and they always have been. The author is simply being disingenuous.

Apparently the license the author chose requires attribution. I am assuming that their stance against IP rights means that they are willing to forego attribution.

There are many things that bear little sense in the absolute, but are a pillar of the world we live in. IP rights are one of them.

The part that strikes me the most is the following: "proponents of IP say that without it we wouldn't have movies and medicine, but we had both for centuries without IP". That's just false.

True, we had art in the Past, but it was a different time: in the Middle Age everything was the King's property, and before him, God's. The critical point is that the business model was different: we relied on rich families to cover the costs. Dante's Commedia was covered by the pockets of the Lords of Ravenna (and the Church). Virgil? Covered by the pockets of Maecenas (and Augustus). Wanna have democracy and equality? Capitalism is the only business model proven capable of sustaining that.

Same goes for medicine, that by the way never reached any meaningful scale before science, IP and capitalism came along.

The author seems less interested in getting the facts right and more interested in pushing forward their political point of view.