The term "Intellectual Property" is a red herring. You cannot have property rights and IP rights. Logically it doesn't work (if you say my computer is my property, but that I can't arrange the bits how I want, then it is not my property). This case is well made in many places so I won't regurgitate much further. But it's important to clarify that the term is a euphemism and is in direct conflict with actual property laws. Better choice of terms include "Intellectual Control Laws", "Intellectual Bureaucracy Laws", or "Intellectual Slavery Laws".
> Trade secret law is important for anyone...
I am not arguing that trade secret law is unimportant for investors of capital. I agree it is very important for investors of capital. However, it seems to be an unnatural state of affairs, to have the government involved in enforcing secrets among its citizens. Why not let the free market figure it out? To me it seems that would be both more equitable and much more effective in a utilitarian sort of way. However, I don't dispute that it is in the strong financial interests of the top 1% of the population (myself included) to keep these laws as is. I'm just saying they are likely unethical and counterproductive if one were to optimize society for innovation.
> I know I personally would not attempt to build high value intellectual property if there were no trade secrets.
Mathematically the world would not notice, even if your name was Edison. The most impactful inventions in the world were all invented far before we had copyright and patent laws. We are all putting grains of sand on mountains built by our ancestors.
> Better choice of terms include "Intellectual Control Laws", "Intellectual Bureaucracy Laws", or "Intellectual Slavery Laws
I'll go ahead and keep calling them what everyone else does, thanks.
> However, it seems to be an unnatural state of affairs,
I'm not overly concerned with what is natural. Many good things are not natural. Why not let the market figure it out? Because the market is known to be inefficient for the production of non-rival, non-excludable goods. Traditional macro econ theory suggests that without protection these goods will be produced less than they ought. There are other solutions to the problem besides government intervention, but the ones I'm aware of require very high levels of consumer coordination.
> We are all putting grains of sand on mountains built by our ancestors.
Then you shouldn't be too bothered about the restriction on handling of trade secrets by folks other than their owners. I mean if it doesn't matter what gets invented, who cares whether someone owns it or not?
> I'll go ahead and keep calling them what everyone else does, thanks.
A very pragmatic position.
> I mean if it doesn't matter what gets invented...
I think inventions matter. But I think our contributions are always marginal compared to what we build upon. If all of the people who say they won't create without monopoly profits stop creating, there will be more than enough people who continue to create that the world won't notice. In fact, it may even improve things. We'd have less intellectual garbage because novelty would stop being rewarded as much as utility.
> If all of the people who say they won't create without monopoly profits
Trade secrets and monopoly profits are different things. The source code for your business' software is a trade secret, even if you don't have a monopoly. It would be untenable to produce software for profit if any of your employees could walk off with your source code after your investment and set up a competing business selling the same thing at a cut rate.
From the sound of it, you might not find this prospect so sad. I can certainly imagine a world where all software is produced by consortiums of users funding development voluntarily. That doesn't seem to be a common general pattern, however, with the exception of a few programs like Blender or Dwarf Fortress. If it were more efficient for producing good software than the status quo I would personally expect to see it happen naturally more often. There's nothing that prevents such arrangements from being created today.
> It would be untenable to produce software for profit if any of your employees could walk off with your source code after your investment and set up a competing business selling the same thing at a cut rate.
You can still ask your employees to keep things secret, of course. Just without government as your enforcer. What would generally happen is you'd have to sweeten the terms of employment to make sure your people are happy. Profits for existing shareholders would drop, probably significantly, but the market would still churn out goods as before, and wages would rise.
> with the exception of a few programs
I would say at this point the majority of important software are not protected by trade secrets (TCP/IP, Linux Kernel, XNU Kernel, Git, DNS, SQLite, MySQL to name a few of many thousands). Tens of thousands of people are paid to work on these open source software products, and yet generally remain with their employers, even though they could "walk out the door" at any moment.
Secrets are fine. Government enforcement of secrets I find highly questionable, and only in the interests of the 1%.
All the software you cited is basically server infrastructure software. I suppose that depending on your definition of important, you could say that this is the majority of important software. Perhaps if important includes only what is needed to develop web properties. But there are a lot of people who use software besides web developers. I don't really buy that your list names even close to the majority of important software by most folks' reckoning of what's important.
Some important (to me and many other people) software you didn't mention:
* Everything besides generic infrastructure that makes
any web property work (Google, Bing, Netflix, Facebook,
Amazon, DropBox, Personal Capital, etc.).
* Microsoft Windows
* Microsoft Office
* Mac OS X
* Nearly all games
* Nearly everything that makes any given bank work
* The Adobe Creative Suite
* Any popular Android or iOS app
I'd guess that the number of people working on the pieces of software I mention here exceeds those working on your list by at least one if not two or three orders of magnitude. I doubt much of it would be economically viable except for government protection of intellectual property.
Anyway, fortunately, the government will likely to continue to protect IP in the foreseeable future. It's working pretty well so far.
Both private property and intellectual property are arbitrary social constructs. You can argue whether one or the other is good or bad if you want, but neither are fundamental laws of the universe and neither are more intrinsically true than the other. You are trying to draw a binary categorical distinction between the two where none exists.
> However, it seems to be an unnatural state of affairs, to have the government involved in enforcing secrets among its citizens.
It's no more "unnatural" than the enforcement of physical property laws. Courts and prisons and cops are artificial human institutions, not part of "nature".
> neither are more intrinsically true than the other.
I would disagree. The term "property" is circa 1300. The term "intellectual property" started being used about 500 years later to (I would say undeservedly) piggy back on the success of the former. But it's an oxymoron, as IP rights in fact contradict property rights, hence it being less "true", in a logical sense.
> It's no more "unnatural" than the enforcement of physical property laws.
Yeah, that line of mine was sort of rhetorical and not substantive. If it were a PR I'd remove it :).
The term "Intellectual Property" is a red herring. You cannot have property rights and IP rights. Logically it doesn't work (if you say my computer is my property, but that I can't arrange the bits how I want, then it is not my property). This case is well made in many places so I won't regurgitate much further. But it's important to clarify that the term is a euphemism and is in direct conflict with actual property laws. Better choice of terms include "Intellectual Control Laws", "Intellectual Bureaucracy Laws", or "Intellectual Slavery Laws".
> Trade secret law is important for anyone...
I am not arguing that trade secret law is unimportant for investors of capital. I agree it is very important for investors of capital. However, it seems to be an unnatural state of affairs, to have the government involved in enforcing secrets among its citizens. Why not let the free market figure it out? To me it seems that would be both more equitable and much more effective in a utilitarian sort of way. However, I don't dispute that it is in the strong financial interests of the top 1% of the population (myself included) to keep these laws as is. I'm just saying they are likely unethical and counterproductive if one were to optimize society for innovation.
> I know I personally would not attempt to build high value intellectual property if there were no trade secrets.
Mathematically the world would not notice, even if your name was Edison. The most impactful inventions in the world were all invented far before we had copyright and patent laws. We are all putting grains of sand on mountains built by our ancestors.