Both Intellectual property and Copyright are harmful ideas in our modern society. This article will go into the issues of both concepts.
But before we delve in, I first want to give examples of bad uses of Intellectual property and copyright in our modern society. For example in Japan, it is illegal to mod games and game consoles and you could get fined for about $10,000 or go to prison for 5 years (it is really funny how nowadays, people do effectively make a big deal of how 1s and 0s are used). A 27 year old man in Japan was arrested for distributing modified saved files of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Nintendo regularly goes after mods, fangames, and has even taken down Yuzu and Ryujinx Switch emulators and Citra which was a 3ds emulator that happened to be made by the same team that made Yuzu. For instance if a PC game has Denuvo, you have to be tethered to some online server where the game has to require a periodic online connection and you can also get locked out of a game for 24 hours if you happen to trigger the DRM too many times even if it is a Single Player game. I had an issue with a game named Persona 4 golden when I played it on my old laptop in 2020 and my internet happened to go down and I couldn't play the game. The Digital Millenium Copyright act unfortunately makes it illegal to remove or reverse engineer DRM. If you happen to accidentally play a copyrighted song on a live stream on Youtube or Twitch, the copyright holder of the song has the right to take down that stream.
Intellectual Property is a harmful idea that people could own ideas, art, concepts, etc like you could with tangible physical property. Copyright is the idea that people like artists and authors have the right to prevent people from distribuing unauthorized copies of things like movies, books, songs, video games, etc without their knowledge or consent. This is pretty illogical since even a copyrighted song on an MP3 file can be cloned and shared an infinite amount of times while something like a candy bar cannot be cloned at all. Some people will still argue that you are stealing from some company or an artist/author/developer because you didn't pay for the unauthorized copy that you obtained. But this doesn't make sense since if you could theoretically clone food, people most likely would say that you are stealing from grocery stores and farmers since you are not paying for your food and are instead cloning already existing food. In fact, the ability that we have with modern computers that we are easily able to clone files and programs is something that is important since it gets rid of scarcity when it comes to computer programs and files. Imagine if we could just clone already existing food, that would help in getting rid of world hunger. But I do think that laws about copyright and intellectual property are outdated and should either be abolished or heavily reduced (copyright shouldn't last more than 10 to 20 years) but ideally it should be abolished. The main reason that copyright laws are overly long and restrictive is that there is major lobbying by companies such as Nintendo and Disney that want to have a tight grip over the creations of their employees and want to monetize merchandising and other media that makes money as long as possible. Copyright lasting the author's life plus another 70 years after the author's death is overly long. After people die, they couldn't care less about how their creations are used since they are not alive anymore. The length of copyright is most definitely due to companies wanting to monetize characters and merchandise as long as possible and if these money hungry corporations had the ability to do so, they would make it so copyright never expires.
To add on to the harmful consequences of copyright and intellectual property, it also create artificial scarcity. For example, many older games from even 10 years ago are not being sold and distributed and many people try to find unauthorized copies of these games from piracy websites since you cannot buy these games brand new anymore and sometimes on the used market, they could be expensive. With companies partnered with the ESA(Entertainment Software Association) like with many game companies like Nintendo, Sony, Square Enix, etc, have the right to take down these games despite not selling them anymore. And sometimes when these companies do rerelease older games like the Mario 3D All Stars which included Mario 64, Sunshine, and Galaxy, only sold the collection for a couple of months physically and digitally and stopped selling the game in both formats after those few months were up. With Video Games that are distributed digitally, you do not have to deal with the production and scarcity of physical media and Nintendo has no good reason to not continue selling the collection other than trying to drive up artificial demand and having the physical versions of these games maintain and increase in value over time.
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