Comment by intended
6 months ago
IP is always strong, because information does not behave like other goods. There are no “degrees” either you have protection and enforce it, or you dont.
It seems we tend to struggle with most things that obey power laws (wealth, attention, trust) in our economies and societies.
> There are no “degrees” either you have protection and enforce it, or you dont.
It's quite possible to have a narrow IP right. Copyright is a good example. The existence of a copyright on Windows doesn't stop anybody from creating Linux.
The problem isn't the copyright itself, it's the likes of DMCA 1201 which allows the copyright on one thing to be leveraged into control over other things, e.g. by restricting adversarial interoperability. Which then gets leveraged into control over things with a network effect, and that's where all the problems come from. An exclusive right should never apply to a network effect.
Likewise, they issue patents not just on ingenious inventions but on abstract gibberish that amounts to a claim on the problem to be solved rather than any particular solution, which they simply ought not to do. Let there be patents on engines and batteries (concrete things) but not software (an abstraction that exists only as information processing).