I appeal to everyone in this discussion to resist and reject the use of the propaganda term "intellectual property" to label the topic now under discussion. It is more clear, and less biased, to describe the topic as "copyright and patents".
The term "intellectual property" encourages simplistic overgeneralization: lumping together copyrights, patents, and various other things too. It also encourages a specific idea of what is important about them--that they are something that could be bought or sold--with all the details, the ways they restrict other people's activities, treated as secondary. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html for more explanation. A discussion that uses the term "intellectual property" is likely to embody that bias as a premise. I don't have time to study the long messages in this thread, but simply to ask whether copyright is "effective" enough suggests that that bias is present. The useful response in such a situation is to bring the bias out in the open and then criticize it. To respond to the details of the arguments erected on that foundation is a side track. -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
