@emaytch @mcc So there's a lot of stuff that Paul Graham says that I don't agree with (these days; used to be pretty bought in), but I think the point he made about the nature of copyright and patent protection ages ago rings true.

Paraphrasing without citation because I'm not going to go crawling around to find it right now: the alternative to IP protection isn't a magical utopia of shared ideas... It's guilds and secret knowledge protected with violence. We already tried society without intellectual property protection.