How trade secrets swallowed your right to know

A corporate veto over your environment, health, and civic duty.

If you’ve never had a fight over the phrase “intellectual property,” count yourself lucky, you normie, you. In the land of Free Software and Free Culture, “IP” is fightin’ words.

Not unreasonably, mind you. “IP” was a deliberately ploy, undertaken by the world’s largest, most aggressive corporations, who hated the existing terms of art, like “creators’ monopolies.” You can see why: it’s hard to ask a legislature to strengthen your monopoly without provoking giggles, but “Help me defend my property”? That’s an appeal to the American state religion.

IP bundles together a mismatched basket of legal concepts: trademark, copyright, patent, trade secrets, and weird and exotic beasts like “database rights” and “broadcast rights.” Muddying these ideas is useful, because it makes it easier to bamboozle laypeople (to say nothing of making fools out of actual fucking idiots):

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1511094112501477377

All this means that “IP” is a misleading, ideological concept that lacks the precision needed to have an adult conversation about policy, or justice, or business. It’s like “family values” or “cultural Marxism” — an empty signifier used by…