Anna's Archive Faces Millions in Damages and a Permanent Injunction

so the role of government is quite different in the two cases: it creates 'intellectual property', in the sense of 'what the owner is deprived of by so-called ip theft', while physical property exists in its own right

if we instead consider 'intellectual property' in the sense of 'literature, knowledge, or designs,' which the owner is not deprived of by 'ip theft', the role of the government becomes precisely opposite to its role with respect to physical property

taking a car as a paradigmatic example of physical property, private ownership rights (whether protected by the state, by moral suasion, by mob violence, or by any other means) protect your car from being stolen so that you can use it; without any security of ownership, people would just get in the nearest car and drive off. you could never be sure a car would be available for you to use, and this would eliminate any private incentive to build cars or to repair or maintain them, resulting in rapid material impoverishment; soon you would have no cars except perhaps for taxpayer-funded public transit. so private ownership rights serve to enable access to cars and similar material goods

literature, knowledge, and designs do not need to be repaired and maintained, especially now that we can use bittorrent instead of linotypes to reproduce them, and if someone else gets in my novel and drives off with it, why, i can still read it as easily as before. the involvement of the state in this case only serves to endanger access to literature, knowledge, and designs—precisely the opposite of the case with physical property

ultimately, intellectual property is completely incompatible with the security of physical property: the trade-secret code of your car's ecu deprives you of some degree of security in your use of that car

people do sometimes argue that an analogous situation obtains with respect to literature, knowledge, and designs: intellectual enclosure through so-called 'intellectual property law' enables creators to require payment from consumers, creating an incentive to write literature, discover knowledge, and create designs. perhaps there is some truth to this, but that is not the only incentive, and evidently it is not a necessary one, given that academic authors (who discover most fundamental knowledge) generally do not receive royalties, and free software reliably leads the software industry in innovation, having almost entirely displaced proprietary software as the basis of the world information infrastructure over the last 30 years

I'd be OK with both requirements.

- no company like nvidia could exist, and for chip design and fabrication we'd be stuck with companies like intel, digital, micron, samsung, and texas instruments; but many other kinds of companies could exist that can't exist currently

- fabs like tsmc would hire design firms like nvidia to produce designs to fabricate; the division of labor would be the same as at present, but banks and investors would send their money to tsmc to pay to nvidia, rather than to nvidia to pay to tsmc

- fabs like tsmc would provide open-source pdks like the skywater pdk to anyone who was interested in designing chips. different open-source gpu designs would proliferate, and jen-hsun huang would be the head of a nonprofit foundation in oregon, spending his days coordinating the contributions of a worldwide network of volunteer electrical engineers and raising his children

- microelectronics fabrication machinery research would be focused on small job-shop equipment using electron beams rather than multibillion-dollar euv fabs, so you could get the chips of your choice fabricated in any downtown with five-day turnaround, much like printed-circuit boards. as before, different open-source gpu designs would proliferate, and huang would be the head of a nonprofit foundation in oregon

- gpu development and fabrication would be internally funded by companies that wanted to use large numbers of gpus, such as amazon and the nsa

of course, companies like nvidia don't depend on the particular 'intellectual property' law being weaponized against anna's archive, and things like anna's archive benefit companies like nvidia rather than threatening them

Maybe it depends on which people you ask, but I don't think the American Dream is about IP at all --- but mostly freedom and independence.