When you think of the word "property" do you think of something like land, a house, cash or coins?

Whatever comes to mind for you they usually share one commonality: they are all tangible physical assets. I believe a person has a right to keep their own private property, for instance it would be wrong if you stole my bike and sold it to buy ethereum. That being said, if you made a physical copy of my bike based on its specific dimensions and various parts that are in need of repair I would wish you full steam ahead. Not only would you have the same crappy bike as me, we could race eachother and it would be a fair match!

So-called "intellectual property" is a vague concept that you have a right to own certain ideas. This is supported by institutions such as copyright law, patents and trademarking. Indeed there are legitimate uses such as a trademark where a company lays claim to a brand name which other companies are prohibited from duplicating. Even with all that, you can find packages of aspirin and the store brand pills where the packaging looks almost the same, just the name is changed.

When you go into deeper, murkier waters like software patents, copyrighting DNA sequences and the human genome, things quickly sink into an ethical quicksand. Is it ethical to patent a DNA test for a cancer gene that you might carry and charge an extreme price for the rights to the test? How about suing a farmer for saving seeds that were pollinated by your GMO soybeans the next field over? Buying the rights to a life-saving drug and charging people 100x the price to manufacture it? These are all real-world examples that need to be discussed.

With all the thousands of pages of copyright law and patents, fancy suit people and well paid lawyers - what does it get us? China and other countries can copy, reverse-engineer and produce any design for cheap. The truth is, if it's profitable to ignore these laws most countries will do it as long as they can get away with it. The reason is simple, because they haven't been brainwashed into the ridiculous idea that ideas can be divided, sliced up and sold to the highest bidder. The natural focus is to promote innovation, new research and discoveries. All ideas and discoveries are made possible by the previous ones. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

Instead, some lazy individuals prefer to sit on their laurels and count the returns from their patents and copyrights. To the extent that they can enforce it, that is. Small artists and individuals with few lawyers will not be able to enforce their copyright at the same level of a megacorp. So it's a deck that's stacked to begin with. The only true way to succeed with your intellectual property (that is, the mass of grey and white matter between your ears) is to constantly be thinking, learning, developing new ideas and concepts. Never go stale. Always expand your horizons, never be afraid to try something different.

I will leave you with this dense quote by Thomas Jefferson:

“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.”

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