Everybody is reading this wrong, which isn't a huge surprise because the Post seems to have nobody on hand who understands the facts of the case and relied on an interview with Lundgren heavily. He was not providing people with restore media they could use to fix their own machines. He was taking the restore media, burning it onto discs _with official Microsoft and Dell logos on them_ and then _selling them to comput…
How are the disks counterfeit? As far as I understand they are functioning exactly like the 'official' disks. Etching the brand on them makes them more easily recognizable, as to what purpose they serve. There is no technical difference between the 'original' disk and the ones this person manufactured, so there is no possible intent to fool anyone. Nobody 'owns' a name or a logo. Intellectual property is impossible.…
It's obvious that intellectual property is a social and legal construct, because the things considered property are intangible, but all other forms of property are also social and legal constructs.
Property is not merely possession -- it is the recognition by society and by the law that you have a right to possess things, and that those rights include preventing people from taking the things you possess.
If you look at the history of property rights in land, which are among the oldest and most fundamental property rights, you'll see how incredibly complicated they became, and how much they have changed over time, and how much of what we think is "just the way things are" is relatively new and does not exist for the reasons we think it does. The legacy of feudal land tenure in modern legal systems is a good example.