I came across the IPPR Intellectual Property and the Public Sphere blog via El Reg this morning. It contains a letter from RMS that picks apart the elements of the so called IP debate. It’s worth a look, but his argument is summarised more effectively by these two paragraphs from his “not-IPR” page:
The term “intellectual property” also leads to simplistic thinking.
It leads people to focus on the meager commonality in form of these
disparate laws, which is that they create special powers that can be
bought and sold, and ignore their substance–the specific restrictions
each of them places on the public, and the consequences that result.At such a broad scale, people can’t even see the specific public
policy issues raised by copyright law, or the different issues raised
by patent law, or any of the others. These issues arise from the
specifics, precisely what the term “intellectual property” encourages
people to ignore. For instance, one issue relating to copyright law
is whether music sharing should be allowed. Patent law has nothing to
do with this. But patent law raises the issue of whether poor
countries should be allowed to produce life-saving drugs and sell them
cheaply to save lives. Copyright law has nothing to do with that.
Neither of these issues is just an economic issue, and anyone looking
at them in the shallow economic perspectives of overgeneralization
can’t grasp them. Thus, any opinion about “the issue of intellectual
property” is almost surely foolish. If you think it is one issue, you
will tend to consider only opinions that treat all these laws the
same. Whichever one you pick, it won’t make any sense.