Intellectual property is about much more than patents. Are you seriously saying that if I copy your work directly (eg source code) and rebrand it, I'm not doing anything wrong? Just innovating?
I'm saying we've pushed the notion of IP too far when I can't see your work and duplicate it on my own without running foul of some bullshit patent. I'm fine with the general idea of copyright, but not it's implementation. But software patents, hell no. Patents on drugs, hell no, patents on processes to make those drugs, maybe, but not on the drug itself. People should be free to reverse engineer anything without violating the law. Reverse engineering should never be illegal.
Ideas should not be own-able. Your software is not an idea, it's an implementation of an idea, you should get some protection of your implementation, nothing more. If someone else can do it better, or at all, they should be able to.
Ideas are not property, copying an idea is not theft.
That's a nice feel-good rhetoric but "ideas" worth protecting don't pop up spontaneously in the shower. They are the end product of a long, costly and risky process. They cost time, money, effort, skills and other resources to develop and (more to the point in this case) convince government organizations that they are safe and effective to be available to the general public. IP is the tool we have to compensate those that take up this huge cost and risk. Feel free to suggest alternative realistic compensation models but until then, enforcing IP is the lesser evil compared to disincentivizing the discovery of such "ideas" in the first place.
And that's a nice bunch of bologna based on the false notion that telling other people they can't do something increases innovation. This very website is proof of the opposite as are most website because it's quite a simple and well known fact that most software violates someone's IP. The web is what it is today because that IP is not enforced, but held in reserves to be used in a mutually assured destruction capacity by the big guys in the industry.
If IP were actually enforced, much of the Internet wouldn't exist. Innovation comes from the free flow of ideas, science has proven this time and again. IP disincentivises real innovation because it prevents people from building upon and improving other people's works. All this innovation you think IP is giving us pales in comparison to what we'd likely have without it.
What you aren't acknowledging is that business doesn't need artificial monopolies to take big risks and make big profits off big ideas because those things aren't necessarily easily copyable anyway. The money necessary to manufacture things is generally more than enough to put up a massive barrier to entry to allow them to profit off their ideas. Job Schmoe isn't going to suddenly take down Intel because Intel wasn't allowed to patent a CPU design because their advantage isn't the design, it's the fab process and how expensive it is. The same applies to drugs or practically anything else.
If your big innovation is so easy to copy that you require an artificial monopoly to make it profitable, then it doesn't deserve to exist. If your business relies on forbidding other people from doing something, your business doesn't deserve to exist.
