Except a credit card number is a piece of information that protects your real money that the word "steal" could definitely be used in relation to. It's like copying a key to a safe. This one however?
Pharma IP is literally the textbook definition of non-zero-sum. You think Fleming's refusal (or inability, or whatever) to patent penicillin resulted in the discovery being zero-sum? It's hard to imagine an example of anything more positive-sum than pharmaceutical knowledge.
A molecule will generally only be approved for a given indication once (until it goes generic). If one company releases it, the second one to discover it can’t.
The terminology used is perfectly fine, consensus is that you can steal intellectual property -- and you can do so without making it inaccessible for the owner.
> consensus is that you can steal intellectual property
There isn't even consensus around the legitimacy of the notion of intellectual property (I'm happy to represent the position that it is not legitimate), let alone the notion that it's proper to use the same word that we use for larceny of physical objects to describe copying it.
In any case, this isn't an intellectual property issue, but a privacy issue. The question is whether this data was properly being kept private, or whether it belongs in the public domain in the first place. There doesn't appear to have been any announcement of what data was accessed, so it doesn't seem to be something we can know at this time.
Yes, there is a consensus. Throughout history and every subject of study, ideas have been attributed to one or a small number of individuals. This is what intellectual property is.
Eastern minds don't believe in it because they don't believe in individual accomplishment or identity. That's why "dissenters" are locked in prison camps or disappeared.
> There isn't even consensus around the legitimacy of the notion of intellectual property.
There is, though. That's why the vast majority of nations have laws protecting intellectual property.
A different position held by a minuscule minority does not make it less of a consensus.
> In any case, this isn't an intellectual property issue, but a privacy issue.
Articles states:
> U.S. drugmaker Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech said on Wednesday that documents related to development of their COVID-19 vaccine had been “unlawfully accessed” in a cyberattack on Europe’s medicines regulator.
And if it is related to the development of their vaccine -- and something for the European Medicines Agency to review, no less --, I'd argue it's nearly impossible that it isn't intellectual property of Pfizer/BioNTech.
> That's why the vast majority of nations have laws protecting intellectual property.
Let's be clear on this one: the vast majority of nations have these laws because the US forced them via trade agreements, and the US has them because the entertainment corporations lobbied the hell out of them. Individuals almost never benefit from these laws.
Individuals consistently benefit from these laws - how do you think so many 'tech millionaires' exist? They had an idea, claimed it as theirs, and profited from it. Individuals don't benefit when these laws are taken away, because there is no incentive to create and all incentive to steal (re: China).
No, it isn't. There is a very important difference here, they are not equal, and the editors have conflated the two problems. An an example, losing your digital photos and losing control of your digital photos are not the same problem for one to have. The article even states that the data was unlawfully accessed, and I think "stolen" in the title is a failure by the editors.
This discussion thread is pretty much garbage, IMO. The first thread is one guy arguing about patents and public domain (with participants having extremist absolutist views of how the world must be), and now some being pedantic about a word...
If anything the extremist view is that publishing secret details about a vaccine should be a crime. The only one who benefits from not publishing them is the vaccine company in expense of everyone else.
Regarding "extremist absolutist views", would you consider entities like the FSF, GNU, and wikileaks to be extremist and absolutist?
As for "being pedantic about a word", I would say that it is not just penancy but rather a complaint about the presentation by the Reuters, in the style of "the evil russian hackers stole vaccine secrets" vs "the heroic security experts published vaccine secrets to the world".
If you have an issue with what these users posted, wouldn't it be better to directly respond to them as to why you disagree rather than dismiss them as extremist lunatics?
