Does that include obscure ones like plant breeder's rights and the EU database directive?
Edit: I am having fun wrapping my head around "moral rights", of which the statute of Anne appears to be a simplification.
I bring it up because I am influenced by Richard M Stallman's
Did You Say “Intellectual Property”? It's a Seductive MirageIn that essay, he argues that you should not talk about "Intellectual Property" like it is one large neat category. Patents, Copyright, Trademarks, and even the more obscure ones all have different purposes.
The main benefit of the term appears to be to convince people that this "virtual property" deserves strong legal protection. Since the 1996 WIPO "Copyright" and "Performances and Phongrams" treaties, copyright has started to trump physical property rights. General-purpose computers are no longer a commodity you can easily buy in the store: the ones you find all implement multiple forms of DRM. Gone are the days when your computer comes with a circuit diagram.
Page 6 refers to
Sui generis used in the EU database directive of that citation.
I am also influenced by Richard Stallman, but he is definitely not arguing for any anarchist political position.
Both you and Stallman make great points that each right and law is a subject in its own category and there are many details one should consider. The reason I can make such broad sweeping attacks across all these IP regulations is I am arguing from an anarchist perspective. Foundationally, these regulations are unethical with the means at which they are enforced.
I'll Elaborate:
Currently, Trademark, copyright, and patents are all enforced through legal systems and treaties which ultimately result in you being kidnapped and tortured if you don't comply. Regulating a society by violating the non-aggression principle is fundamentally unethical and we as a people should think of more creative ways to address concerns that IP laws speak to solving.
Bitcoin is a fantastic first step created by crypto-anarchists where contracts and money can be peacefully used without breaking the non-aggression principle as the cryptography and protocol itself regulate the ecosystem rather than threats behind the violence of the state.
Lets take one example of how IP can be protected peacefully: trademarks. Namecoin and nameId could be used in the ecosystem to digitally watermark brand logos so when a customer scans the product a query request can made to a database to authenticate that the product is genuine. Knockoffs with similar logos and trademarks can exist but any retailer that sells such knockoff can quickly be identified by the general public and socially ostracized due to introducing consumer confusion which will lead to a decrease in sales for the retailer due to fewer customers.
