"Intellectual property" is a horrible concept that needs to die.
An opinion generally professed by those whose ideas don't warrant copyrighting.
Yes, I'm generally in support of the interest of those who don't own capital (whether physical or cultural) over those who do. That's socialism for you.
Stephen Foster and several other nineteenth-century musical figures died in penury because of their lack of any legal entitlement to make money from their own work. Framing actual writers and artists (as opposed to the vultures at Disney or Viacom) as capitalists for purposes of this issue strikes me as a serious mistake.
There's a real lack of nuance in this discourse that belies the actual views of working artists and those opposed to corporate orthodoxy. We now live in the era of Creative Commons, GNU, and so on, alternatives to standard intellectual property laws that stray from the zero-tolerance greed and litigiousness advanced for creative works by the least creative people imaginable while still requiring just attribution and protecting the original creative intentions of the work (preventing it from being co-opted by someone else into Big Intellectual Property). I think that both extremes are the work of those without regard for creators in this time where we refer to "content" and "content creators" in the most dehumanizing terms possible, and there's working proof that another way is viable. Protecting the interests of creators and the interests of those who consume and reinterpret their work doesn't need to be as mutually exclusive as the post-Sonny Bono world insists it is.
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