I just read a great article by Daniel Krawisz, making a case against intellectual property. Read the whole thing here. Intellectual property has always given me a weird feeling. It seemed to me that something was wrong there, but I could never figure it out. This article got me to look at it from a new, much clearer perspective, so I’ll be thinking hard about this for a while.
The main point is that owning intellectual property is not a right to an idea, but some small amount of ownership and control over all the physical objects that could possibly be used to recreate that idea.
If you have an intellectual property right to your monograph, you may prevent me from copying it, thereby limiting the physical property right I have in my ink, pen, and paper.
Similarly, if I record an original song, I now have some small ownership of all speakers everywhere in the universe, enough to prevent them from reproducing my recording.