[pp.int.general] WIPO DG mentions Pirate Party in speech to Blue Sky conference

[Richard Stallman]

    > It is way easier to explain that Intelectual Property does not exist, rather then attempting to explain what we want to do with it.
    >

    It's certainly easier to claim that, but it's also false.

His statement is basically true, but not philosophically careful.
Pedantically speaking, "intellectual property" is a bogus concept that
doesn't fit reality.  It refers to many different laws that do exist,
but describes them falsely in terms of a fictitious substance.

You mentioned that all of these laws are being used to squeeze money
out of the "South".  (I think you mean poor countries, which are not
coterminous with the southern hemisphere.)  However, lots of other
laws are used for that too.  For instance, agricultural subsidies and
tarifs.

Meanwhile, the injustice of today's copyright policy hurts people
in developed countries such as Sweden, which is why the Pirate Party
exists there.

    for instance, 
    intellectual property rights are very much property rights, even "firm 
    assets" (note: FIRM) that can be used for assessing the risk of giving 
    someone a loan or the security in giving someone an insurance for giving 
    someone a loan.

It sounds like this is a policy of bias in favor of the copyright
industry (among others).  That is something we probably want to
oppose.

My information about this is incomplete, but it seems to be a
consequence of some treaty or agreement that is formulated in terms of
the bogus concept of "intellectual property".  I don't know about this
one, but I know of others, such as TRIPES.  What these prove is that
governments have based some of their thinking on the bogus concept of
"intellectual property", naturally leading to bad results.

This doesn't make the term valid.  Rather, we can cite this as part of
the harm that the term has done.

    The associated 
    documents/obligations describing the debt are a further form of 
    (intellectual) property than can also be bought and sold between 
    different actors.

If you stretch the term "intellectual) property" to include negotiable
instruments, you're using it in a nonstandard way.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org, www.gnu.org