Even experts get it wrong

> It isn't property, I can't hold on to it, I can't touch it, and I can't steal it. You don't have any right to an idea over any other human. This is an abstract construct which attempts to create an artificial commodity where there isn't one.

Apart from "holding on to it," what you say in the quote sentence is true for pretty much any property. In a strict sense, property is what you can defend. However, in order stop people using violence to defend their property, the government steps in and defines material property and vows to defend it for you through laws about theft, etc.

So property is an abstract concept enforced by the government.

Now, the government simply looks around and says, "what else is valuable for people that we can protect for them?" One is land ownership. You can't physically be on the border of your land all the time with a gun, so the government has laws about trespassing and poaching, etc., and enforces them for you.

Money is another abstract concept the government defends. It makes things easier for everyone to have a common currency, instead of trading chickens and cows, so even though $1 doesn't have a "material" meaning, it represents value and therefore people have agreed to respect it. The government proposes a country-wide currency to replace instability of ad-hoc currencies.

Another is copyright. The government agrees that creative people deserve "ownership" over their work, so they can profit from it, and this bargain is struck in order to encourage development of culture. It's a concept of intellectual property that is simply a contract between the people and the government, and the government vows to defend it.

Another example is patents. The government wants to encourage research and development, and one way it sees to do so is to help inventors profit from their ideas by vowing to defend their rights to it for a certain amount of time.

Before you get all upset (if you're not already), I agree very, vere strongly with the position that there are clearly problems with patents--specifically that they encourage many things we find distasteful as society, and the minefield effect is terribly detrimental, especially in certain areas like computer programming. There's no question that patents are a problem today, with the pace of technological development being what it is, and it's clogging up the legal system like nothing else. These are things that need to be solved. If the solution is to abolish patents I'm not even necessarily against that, though I think I agree with Judge Posner that they make sense for certain industries.

However, the claim that patents and copyright and any intellectual property is not consistent with the idea of material property is, imho, completely false. All of these concepts share the same root, that the government vows to defend your ownership over something. Just because some property is material and other property is "intellectual" does not make the latter "abstract" and therefore invalid, because the whole concept of property is abstract, it is nothing but an agreement.

This is the role of government, really, and I'd say one of its only legitimate roles, apart from infrastructure building, is to establish agreements on what we consider property, and enforce them. Now, whether this is done well is a subject of debate, but conceptually it is self-consistent.

If you don't agree with this, feel free to grab your gun, squat somewhere with everything you own, build a wall, and try to keep everyone from taking your stuff, but otherwise you have to acknowledge that the whole concept of property itself is as intangible the idea of intellectual property.

That doesn't excuse certain aspects of intellectual property from being ill-defined or badly designed, but the concept is not invalid. The extension from material property is a logical one.

Defendant can ask for a chance of venue. Plaintiffs used to join many defendants into a single lawsuit, partly in the hope that this would make it less likely that a defendant would be able to get a change of venue, because one case with multiple defendants is a more efficient use of limited judicial resources than several different cases and so the courts would be reluctant to let a defendant move just their case to somewhere else.

The America Invents Act changed this. Now the plaintiff cannot join unrelated defendants in one lawsuit, and so defendants have a much better chance of getting the case moved out of EDT. In face, since that provision of AIA went into effect, more patent cases have been filed in Delaware than EDT.

EDT actually is not particularly plaintiff friendly when it comes to results. There are several other districts where plaintiffs have a higher winning percentage than EDT. Last time I saw stats, a couple years ago, EDT wasn't even in the top 5.

The big attraction of EDT was/is:

1. The judges there are very familiar with patent law and patent litigation. Patent litigation is among the most complicated litigation, and whether you are a plaintiff or a defendant you want a judge who has experience with it.

2. There isn't a lot of Federal crime in EDT. Criminal cases have priority over civil cases, and in districts with a lot of Federal crime civil cases can suffer great delays. Try to litigate a patent case in a district where the courts are clogged with criminal cases (hello, war on drugs!) and you could be in litigation for a decade or more. Neither plaintiff nor defendant generally wants that.

>within the term of the patent, the likelihood that anyone else independently invents the same thing is sufficiently small //

The problem then is that there is little to no incentive for the applicant to share the idea. If it's something no one will come up with, then you can keep it secret and benefit from an indefinitely extended monopoly.

The quid pro quo of patents is early information about new inventions in exchange for limited time monopoly. Here you're encouraging inventors/companies to prefer industrial secrets.

If inventions meet your requirements but are kept secret then the public domain will be worse off as no one gets the benefit of being able to privately use/research the invention unless it can be replicated. With a patent the full details are disclosed.

Obviousness is very difficult to assess because some things that took many years developing are so ingenious that they seem obvious. The applicant always has the argument - if it were so obvious how come, in such a well worked field, with such demand for this invention, how come it wasn't already developed? The answer of course is that it wasn't "obvious" [to the skilled practitioner with knowledge of the prior art in the relevant domain].

> Why do opponents of IP rights keep saying it isn't stealing?

shrug

probably because it was ruled thus by the supreme court. so, i guess there's that...

http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=3901205964610715...

m3mnoch.

Arguably the identity part modifies the type of theft, as in "theft using your identity". They take your money, or your credit, and use your identity to do so.

Either way I think that one is arguable. Can you still enjoy free use of your identity once it's been used in this way. Remember in this that your "identity" is not your real identity attached to your person it's your identifying details as used by banks and such.