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Comment by Ace17 | Hacker News Reader

The simple use of the term "IP" goes against your goal. All these things we call "IP" are mostly unrelated to the notion of "property" itself ; they're related to temporary government-enforced monopolies.

This simplistic view as a "property", which is a very familiar notion for most of us, confuses people into thinking that they could, and should be able to "own", for example, a joke, an idea for a business, or any kind of idea, the same way they can today own their car or their house.

The law is way more complicated than that, and by default, ideas can't be owned (and for that matter, can't be "stolen" either). I don't think we want this to change. However, it might be desirable to get this into peoples' mind.

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> The simple use of the term "IP" goes against your goal. All these things we call "IP" are mostly unrelated to the notion of "property" itself ; they're related to temporary government-enforced monopolies.

It also lumps together many unrelated things. There is no big trouble with trademarks. Copyright itself isn't even a problem, the problem there is DRM. But software patents are unredeemable. They aren't all the same.

There's also a bunch of other mostly unrelated stuff that gets called intellectual property, such as regional designations (e.g. "designed in California") and ship hull designs, which receive their own special treatment:

https://www.quora.com/Why-were-boat-hull-designs-specificall...

Each of these "intellectual properties" has its own special nuances and treatments, and often completely different laws. You have to demonstrate originality to copyright something, but you can trademark the most unoriginal things. You have to demonstrate that something has a function before you can patent it, but you can copyright the most useless things. You need to demonstrate that something really was created where you want to regionally designate it, but you don't need to prove anything to trademark it.

Lumping them all together is like saying programming, literature, mathematics, and theatre are all the same just because they all happen to have some sort of abstraction to them.

Dude! programming, literature, mathematics and theatre are all "text stuff"!

> All these things we call "IP" are mostly unrelated to the notion of "property" itself ; they're related to temporary government-enforced monopolies.

All "property" is government enforced monopolies, and much of it outside of IP (and especially much of the broader class of intangible personal property of which IP is itself as subclass) is also either temporary or conditional in nature.

The difference is, a property right to a single parcel of land doesn't give you market power. You don't own every similar parcel of land. It isn't a monopoly in the antitrust sense. But a patent on a device does exactly that.

> The difference is, a property right to a single parcel of land doesn't give you market power.

Depends on the features of the parcel and the nature of the market for use of it.

> Depends on the features of the parcel and the nature of the market for use of it.

And in the patent case it doesn't.

Of course it does. The claims define what a patent covers. Noting that the vast majority (95%+?) of patents go unused, it's reasonable to assume that they have some correlation with market usage. What other hypothesis would you posit for the over abundance of value-less patents? Mine is that most ideas have no market value terrible, hence most patents don't either.

> The claims define what a patent covers.

And then it covers all of them. The whole market. It's like if you owned a ranch house on a beach and that caused you to become the owner of every ranch house on every beach, and if someone built a new one somewhere else on some land that isn't yours then you would become the owner of it too. That's not how real property works.

And you're confusing the value of the market with control over it. It's possible to have a total monopoly on some useless junk nobody wants.

In the antitrust sense, the standard set upthread, market power requires pricing power, which inn turn requires that there is both some market demand and inefficient competition from market substitutes (which need not be identical) to constrain the monopolists ability to set prices and extract rents.

Pricing power doesn't actually require demand, it's just that nobody cares about the markets where there is no demand. But it's still a monopoly, which you would notice immediately if any demand ever came to exist, the hope for which is why people even bother applying for those patents.

Without demand, the test for pricing power (the ability to raise prices from some level at which there are nonzero sales without losing sales) cannot be satisfied -- you can't have market power with no market.

> Without demand, the test for pricing power (the ability to raise prices from some level at which there are nonzero sales without losing sales) cannot be satisfied -- you can't have market power with no market.

In theory that's the test, but it doesn't actually work. In practice market power isn't binary. There is always a substitute for anything if you jack the price up high enough. And a monopolist would jack the price right up to that point, so that increasing it any more would cost sales.

But the zero volume case is the divide by zero case anyway. A test isn't going to give you a yes or no, it's going to give you NaN. That doesn't mean there is no market power, it only means you can't tell without a buyer. And in the patent case, as soon as there is a buyer there is market power.

Sure it does; there's no pricing (and therefore market) power if the mechanism, however novel and eligible for protection, has alternatives with equal utility.

> Sure it does; there's no pricing (and therefore market) power if the mechanism, however novel and eligible for protection, has alternatives with equal utility.

That's kind of the point. A patent by its nature has zero value without market power.

Contrast this with actual property. If you have wheat or copper, you have no market power, it's a pure commodity market, but people will still pay you something for it.

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