“I’m an anarcho-capitalist, and a huge supporter of property rights, both physical and intellectual. At the same time, I find the current trend of increasing penalties for minor violations, criminalizing civil IP matters, anti-consumer technologies like DRM, and abuse of the legal system by the *AA’s of the world really disturbing. You’d think that by now, there’d be a reasonable solution to the problem of protecting intellectual property while at the same time maintaining the rights of consumers and protecting individuals from absurd litigation, but I have yet to find one. So, I pose these questions to the Slashdot community: 1 — Do you acknowledge the legitimacy of intellectual property to begin with? That is, do you believe that intellectual property is a valid construct equivalent to physical property, or do you think it’s illusory? If not, why? 2 — If so, how would you go about protecting the rights of intellectual property holders in a way that doesn’t require unfair usage limitations or resort to predatory abuse of the tort system?”

Source: [1] Slashdot 

• In the UK, as in most countries, the amount of wealth a person has is generally inversely proportional to how hard they’ve worked for it. The richest people are mostly the ones who inherited it and didn’t work for it at all.

  Intellectual “property” is rapidly reaching the same state. Consider the notorious copyright on the century-old “Happy Birthday” song. It is currently owned by Warner Chappell, and you’d be hard pressed to show that the officers of that corporation have ever done anything that qualifies as “work” to realize the several million dollars in royalties that it brings them each year. OTOH, the Hill sisters that wrote the song never received any income from it at all, but as elementary-school teachers, they worked rather hard their whole lives (and produced the song as part of their job).

  This is typical of how Intellectual Property actually works. The actual creators rarely realize any significant income from their creators; the income generally goes to the owners of corporations that control the mass-production and distribution channels. This control generally comes not from any sort of hard work, but rather from financial and political power that makes it possible for them to exclude competition.

• Exactly! And further, even if a patent is actively making money, it should still expire in 10 years tops. Theres no reason in todays economy that a patent should last more than a decade. Ditto copyright. Life of creator is just rubbish.
• Well the problem with what you just mentioned is when the seeds does what comes naturally to them, that is spread and when the gene modified seeds spreads to a different farmers field he apparently owes monsanto extortion(royalty) fees.

  A farmer in a community can’t do without paying Monsanto royalty fees a few years after another farmer in that community decides he wants to use them.

  That system is inherently flawed because the protected property will spread all on it’s own regardless of the wishes of the original user or any new involuntary users.

• If we assume that technology and communications is improving, and the pace of progress is increasing then logically the duration of monopoly should get shorter and shorter rather than longer.

  Nowadays if a movie is good it makes a profit within a few weeks of its release. If it’s not good, stop making bad movies then.

  It is ridiculous that there should be a monopoly for > 100 years.

  Think about it, if copyright only lasted 7 years, do you think Microsoft would dare release something as crap as Vista? They’d have to make something significantly better than Windows 2000.

  If Microsoft won’t want to play by those rules, I’m sure Apple or some others will be happy to take over.

  As for patents and people talking about drugs needing long patent terms, the AFAIK drug companies spend more money on marketing (aka bribing doctors with goodies and holidays) than R&D, and FDA approval.

• …Copyrights and patents are valid constructs, but are not and should not be equivalent to physical property. I find them tolerable as long as it’s a temporary monopoly designed as an incentive to contribute to the public knowledge space . That is why I object to calling it property.