Intellectual Property Beef

I have a beef with intellectual property and patent laws - government created monopolies that one might argue is the largest hindrance to progress in the world today.

The argument FOR patents and intellectual property is that they are needed as an incentive to innovate new works and technologies.

But does that argument hold water? Would companies cease to innovate because some other company would just copy their innovation? (perhaps even improve on it)? The answer is obviously "no". Read this article, and you will see that the overall result is LESS innovation. Shouldn't our goal be to create as much competition as possible - lowering prices and increasing the quality of products which raises standard of living of all people on this earth? Riiigght, I forgot. It doesn't increase the standard of living of the company that has the monopoly. They enjoy the benefits of charging whatever they want for a product that they have no reason to improve.












I see "must read" books everywhere I look. Lord knows if we all read more books the world would be a better place. But what am I expected to do? If I bought every one of these books I would be flat broke. How are the poor supposed to educate themselves?
Let's take a hypothetical situation and say that "Bob" is a poor man that desperately wants to educate himself - for the benefit of himself and the rest of society. But Bob has no money, so he goes to thepiratebay.org and starts downloading E-books. Now, these E-books have copyright laws protecting them, and XYZ company (the owner of these copyrights) would sue Bob for downloading these E-books. But did Bob hurt XYZ company in any way? XYZ company wasn't out any money. Bob certainly wasn't going to buy the books at a bookstore - he has no money. He didn't even know if they were worth reading until after he started reading them.
But apparently, Bob "stole" the intellectual property of XYZ company, even though XYZ company lost nothing.

Bottom line: copyright/intellectual property laws are government privileges given to those that don't want others to know what they know - unless they make a profit from it.
If we want uneducated people to make educated decisions we need to start with intellectual property reform.