I totally agree, we should treat animals the same as we treat humans. I really don’t understand why so many people value animal lives lesser to those of humans.

Is it possible to eat those humans? If it’s actually nutritious I don’t see a problem, and it’s less wasteful, as you said. Soylent Green operated on this principle.

No water, only crab juice.

How could you even track accounting profits that far back in time to repay today? What if the family descendants are poor today? (They lost everything in the Great Depression, as an example)

Sure it is, because they’re not doing it to stress test but to rent-seek. They’re not coming from an altruistic place of helping build a better system, but from greed, and a desire to earn money without doing much work.

Yes it is, it has to do with abusing the spirit of a law. Patent law exists to protect innovation so as to encourage it. Patent trolls do the opposite.

Similar laws which were designed to allow people in a community some measure of voice in that community have been abused for years to enact Nimbyism. That’s also abusing the spirit of the law.

Humans are just awful cunts.

That is the sole right of the creator/author to determine. Many creators do stipulate in their wills that upon their death, all their works go into the public domain. Others leave it to their descendants to profit from. But the point is, it’s the right of the owner to do with it what they will, just as it’s your right as a homeowner to decide what happens to your house/property when you die.

The only place I can see room for looser IP laws is in the medical domain, so that important live saving medicines aren’t locked away behind patents and price gouging. However, I also fully understand why there are strong patents in medicine: because drug research is incredibly expensive and time consuming, and there needs to be an incentive to do it by private companies, and patents create that incentive because they know if they find some wonder drug, they can recoup their research costs and make a profit too. If there was no IP protection in medicine, then there would be no incentive for private companies to do it, so the government would have to do it all (maybe that is a better system overall, not sure).

Like I said before, IP laws could definitely do with some serious revision to bring them up to date for the 21st century, and remove things like patent trolling, but in my opinion, it’s ludicrous to say we should do away with them entirely and live in some kind of IP-less society.

Yes I do think it’s better. If it were up to me, copyrights and patents would last forever, and not just for 100 years (or less). What Tolkien created is his and his alone, and he and his family should continue to profit from it for all time, it’s his creation to do with as he pleases. Why on earth should it not work like that? Why should society take away then product of someone’s hard work and creation? That sounds like a horrible, North Korea society. If an author wants to put their work in the public domain for all to have, they can still do so.

As somebody already told you in another post, in a world without IP protection, people would just jealously guard their secrets and their secrets would die with them. Tremendous human genius would be lost rather than shared with all of humanity, because nobody would ever be inclined to share anything. And if creators couldn’t make a living, you’re talking about a world utterly devoid of creativity. We wouldn’t have things like Tolkien, Harry Potter, Star Wars, if creators didn’t exclusively own the rights to their creation so they could profit from them, because what would be the incentive to create then? In any economic system, people acts as greedy, rational agents, so rewarded and ownership rights must exist or there is zero motivation to create.

Like all human laws, patents and copyrights can be woefully abused if people and laws allow for abusive behaviour, such that they stifle innovation rather than help it. But this isn’t a problem specific to IP itself, humans are just awful creatures who will abuse any form of law if they can (unions for example, can also be horrific, just look at the USA police union). We could improve laws to get rid of things like patent trolls without discarding the concept of IP entirely.

I’m also a programmer, and you cannot copy any of my code, unless you want to pay me for it.

So two programmers can fundamentally disagree on whether or not their hard work should be accessed for free.

This is a ridiculous argument. In your world, how would anyone who makes an intangible product ever be fairly compensated if you could just steal it? Things like books, songs, video games, films do take real effort, time, care, talent, and loads of hard work to create, and if someone consumes that, they need to pay the creators for that consumption. Your view is rather myopic because a society doesn’t just produce tangible, physical products, but many other intangible products and services. For example, Tolkien wrote and created the entire LotR world, why should his property not be protected so that he can earn some money from all that hard work if some customer wants to consume it? Because it certainly takes an immense amount of work and talent to create something. As someone else mentioned, you have no right to claim the fruits of anyone’s labour.

I find a lot of people make the argument you’re making to try and justify their own theft of IP. But those same people sing an entirely different song the moment someone else begins to steal from them. I certainly hope that happens to you someday, that your hard work is not fairly compensated or stolen from you, so you can understand it from the opposite perspective too.