If you work in the software industry today, IP protection is part of what keeps you paid, and it's hypocritical to want to deny the same protection to other creative professionals... Especially considering how hard it is to make a living as a furniture designer compared to a software developer.
(That said, I would definitely vote for shortening copyright terms across the board. Something like 50 years from creation date would be fine IMO. These "X years after death" provisions are ridiculous because they only serve to make payouts to descendants that didn't participate in the original creative work.)
> If you work in the software industry today, IP protection is part of what keeps you paid,
I work in a company that does assessments for other companies. I write in-house software to perform those assessments. They give us the data and we give them reports.
There's no "IP" [sic] involved in any of this. There are service contracts and so forth, but my salary would come just as well if our customers had our source code (not that any of them would know what to do with it). Our company provides a service in the form of trained professionals who know how to perform the assessment aided by the software written by people like me who do it. I guess maybe our brand name is important, so perhaps trademarks help us, but that's a completely separate matter from what you are blanket calling "IP". We do not rely on patents (design or not) or copyright to get our pay.
Google, Facebook and Amazon own plenty of copyrights and patents. I don't see them campaigning to eliminate IP law.
Even though the corporations release a lot of open source, they probably prefer the current status quo of explicit licenses placed on code they choose to release, rather than an alternative world of all code being in public domain.
I don't see how it would be to Google's advantage if source code had no IP status at all: an ex-employee could keep a copy of the Google source tree and legally put it on Github.
