Does society accept this behaviour outside tech? Imagine that a Michelin restaurant would claim copyright on the dishes cooked by the chef in his spare time. Or that the big farm would ask for a piece of those carrots grown in the back yard.
Intellectual Property and Copyright aren't quite the same thing. The IP is the idea, whereas the copyright is the specific recipe. So in my mind, the equivalent would be using your learned cooking skills for another restaurant while working at a Michelin restaurant. They both serve food (competing or related industry), but while the dishes are different, the techniques to create them come from the same source. I woul…
Those are three very different kinds of temporary monopolies granted by the government, but the people who promote the phrase "intellectual property" want them to be considered as not a government-granted monopoly on a certain kind of business, but as a natural form of property comparable to physical property, which it really isn't.