I hate the term intellectual property. It’s a word used to describe vastly different concepts with vastly different legal backgrounds and problems.

Copyright is theoretically a good thing, giving an artist or writer the time to profit from their work before the work becomes public domain, incentivizing the work. The current international agreements around it are absolutely bonkers thanks to Disney. The fact that the copyright persists after death, let alone for a century, is complete madness. The artist obviously can’t profit from their work after they’re dead. It’s an absolute shameless cash grab that destroys culture.

Patents are also theoretically a good thing, allowing companies to release specifications of machines that allow for 10 years of exclusive use. Without patents, companies would hide their designs as trade secrets. It guarantees that after a decade, the designs will be publicly available for anyone to see. They need to be much more heavily restricted in what you can put patents on though. Patenting a specific machine design is fine, patenting molecules or math breaks the entire system. Software patents are blatantly absurd and broken.

EDIT: Should also mention that 3D printers are a patent success story of the system working as intended. Patented in 1986, the inventor made good money making expensive machines with his own company. In 1996, the patent expired and we had an explosion of competing machines, getting ever cheaper and more effective. Everybody won. The inventor made bank for his decade of exclusivity, and then everyone benefited from the design being public domain, free for everyone to use.

Trade secrets, the protection of specific recipes, client lists and strategies, can be abused to protect companies against disclosing information that may be very pertinent to their customers and governments. The Coca-Cola recipe or lists of clients as a trade secret is fine imho, but they can also abuse trade secret law to hide systems that lie about your car’s emissions.

Trademarks help protect consumers against knockoff brands that pretend to be what they’re not. This is the least abused type of “IP”. This doesn’t mean there aren’t bad actors out there registering tons of different trademarks to squat on those designs & names, hoping to force a new company to pay up to use the name. Trademark squatting could theoretically be solved by annulling the trademark if the company isn’t actively using it. Trademarks are currently much too easy to maintain.

All of this to say, lumping all of these different laws into “IP” is not useful at all when talking about the goals of the different legislations, what they’re trying to do, and how they fail.