Intellectual Rights

From USPP Wiki

"Intellectual Property" is a word that is often used in the context of those laws the Pirate Party wishes to reform. This term is typically used as a catch-all phrase, encompassing copyrights, patents, and trademarks.

However, "Intellectual Property," besides being far too broad a term for proper discourse, is a very poor choice of words.

The term "Intellectual Property" implies a connection to true property- to physical property. The laws of physical property are wonderfully simple: a person owns an object, and it is theirs, for eternity, and they generally may do with it what they wish, and when they die, they may pass it on to whoever they wish. To think this model should or could also apply to ideas is a delusion. To quote Thomas Jefferson:

• "It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs....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. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property...Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea...generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society."

"Intellectual property" is, in no way, property. Unlike true property, it's not expensive to reproduce and make copies of or to distribute. The Pirate Party promotes legalization of noncommercial works redistribution. If ideas were Property, then this would clearly amount to theft; we admit as much. But creative works are not property. Ideas are not property. To treat them as things that can be stolen, given, and traded like so many objects is a gross misunderstanding of their nature, not to mention a deep disservice to their authors.

A far better phrase to use when referring to creative works or ideas is "intellectual rights" (from the French "droits intellectuels"). It is a term originating in 19th century Europe with our specific purpose in mind, to distinguish between the two points of view - that patented ideas and copyrighted works should be treated like mere objects with those associated rights, versus the idea that they should be treated with respect and given limited exclusivity, but mostly, that they should be spread as far and wide as our physical world allows.

We wish to loosen the knots that tie down Ideas. As such, let us use the term Intellectual Rights from now on.