Comment by II2II

Even when a person is on board with intellectual property rights, there is still a distinction between the vendor created program and the user created data. Encoding the data in an undocumented or obfuscated file format may not exert legal rights over that data, but it effectively does so.

I can only see three reasons why someone would support intellectual property rights with respect to file formats: they believe the manipulation of data done by software implies a transfer of ownership of the data, at least in its modified form; they are making a cynical grab for control over the data; or they are incredibly naive.

(There are border cases, such as novel compression schemes, where how the data is stored is the product. That does not really matter when someone is using a file format as a simple container for data. If a file format is truly a border case, there should also be ample forewarning to the end user.)