IP laws are flawed today in their implementation but it is a serious mistake to say that they are what is blocking innovation in America.
It is easy to pick some extremes of flawed implementation of IP laws and to ridicule their effects. Software patents have been seriously abused to block innovation, with the prototypical troll being, in effect, the equivalent of some lawyer sitting in a back room endlessly "conceiving" ideas from which extortion-style demands can be exacted. So too with things like the RIAA-led lawsuits demanding millions in damages for the downloading of 20 songs or the Disney-inspired extensions of copyright terms to ridiculous lengths having nothing to do with protection of any conceivable right of an author. Such items can readily and rightly be mocked and cast as the absurd anti-innovative creatures that they are. Nor does it help that the beneficiaries of such legal aberrations are often large and powerful companies, lawyers and lobbyists, and others who might be characterized as the antithesis of innovation in any productive society.
That said, IP laws do not in any sense categorically block innovation and, indeed, remain essential to it.
To understand the true importance of IP laws, we need to look at fundamentals. Property is both tangible and intangible. You can touch the former and physically transfer it to someone else. It is a thing that is possessed by someone and such possession excludes or limits possession by others because it is a finite resource that can only be shared so much. In the modern age, in contrast, intangible property is capable of almost infinite replication with few, if any, incremental costs. The temptation exists, then, to say that all such property should be commonly shared because it can be so shared and because people will use it to make advancements for the betterment of themselves and society. In other words, there presumably is no cost to making all information free, legally unprotected, and infinitely shareable. Or so the thinking goes.
But this assumption is not sound.
IP laws are designed to protect all forms of intangible property having commercial value. This means patents (which protect inventions), copyrights (which protect any tangible embodiment of an original work of authorship), trademarks (which protect the distinctiveness of the origin of goods or services), and trade secrets (which protect any form of valuable confidential and proprietary information).
These laws are so built into the fabric of the startup world that we normally just take them for granted.
For example, no startup could hope to survive without laws protecting trade secrets. Without such laws, whatever information or knowledge base you have in your startup that is unique and valuable could be lifted at will by any passing person: an employee who passes through and copies such information wholesale to give it to a competitor; the janitor who comes in at night who decides to publish it on the internet; someone who breaks into your network, copies it all, and then shares it with the world or, worse, if it is a competitor, who uses it to compete against you. If you once take the legal position that all information is free and freely shareable, then all protections for your confidential business plans, for your technical innovations, for your execution strategy, for your database of key customers, personnel, marketing data, etc. evaporate and you can no longer derive any competitive advantage from any of this as long as anyone gets his hands on it and makes it public.
Founder groups would have the same problem in pre-formation situations. Say, four founders build something that they have worked on for a full year and are prepared to launch. One of them defects and says to the group, "I am going to take everything that we have worked on and take it for myself." Of course, that is outrageous. Buy why? Because laws exist that declare it illegal for someone to misappropriate what the founders have been working on. Those are IP laws. They protect the interests in intangible property. Without them, every founder would be vulnerable to such defections, without any form of legal recourse.
Copyright serves a similar function. Whenever a startup relies on proprietary code, it is copyright (along with trade secret laws) that ensures that the work product of the company can't simply be lifted at will and used in any way that the person taking the code desires.
Open source is no exception. It relies heavily on rules of copyright law and on licensing to make its system work. If everything were freely shareable without any form of restriction, one does not have open source - one has freeware.
I could go on with this but, having already noted the potential for serious abuse when such laws are ill-formed, I think I have said enough to show that IP laws lie at the foundation of the startup world and are not in themselves the enemy. There are philosophical arguments to be made that all information should be freely shareable but any society based on that premise would be radically different from the one in which startups thrive today.
Startups depend heavily on IP laws. Such laws have great value in today's startup culture and ought to be recognized for that contribution. Reform them, absolutely; abolish them, don't even think about it (unless you are ready to embrace a philosophically extreme position about all forms of intangible property ownership). I don't believe most people are prepared to embrace the extreme position and, hence, one ought to be careful about castigating that which is good while condemning that which we can agree is bad.
Bottom line: IP laws do not kill innovation and, on the contrary, are vital to it. Flawed IP laws stink and need to be reformed.
For example, no startup could hope to survive without laws protecting trade secrets.
The assumptions here are that your secrets give you an advantage by being secret, that they're easier to steal than to rediscover, and that that advantage is necessary to success. These assumptions are not universally correct, and I suspect that their degree of correctness is rather strongly overestimated.
Founder groups would have the same problem in pre-formation situations. Say, four founders build something that they have worked on for a full year and are prepared to launch. One of them defects and says to the group, "I am going to take everything that we have worked on and take it for myself." Of course, that is outrageous. Buy why? Because laws exist that declare it illegal for someone to misappropriate what the founders have been working on. Those are IP laws. They protect the interests in intangible property. Without them, every founder would be vulnerable to such defections, without any form of legal recourse.
That doesn't sound like any of the standard copyright/patent/trademark/trade-secret categories, it sounds like it has something to do with (probably implied) contracts.
Open source is no exception. It relies heavily on rules of copyright law and on licensing to make its system work. If everything were freely shareable without any form of restriction, one does not have open source - one has freeware.
So then Postgres, SQLite, the BSDs, clang, etc are freeware instead of open source?
Startups depend heavily on IP laws. Such laws have great value in today's startup culture and ought to be recognized for that contribution. Reform them, absolutely; abolish them, don't even think about it
I don't think that's a sound argument, we've done just fine abolishing other practices that businesses seemed to depend on. What is observed to happen when/where such laws don't exist or are generally ignored?
When the startup lawyer says that the protections for parties in startups from defection and unfair competition are derived from IP laws, I tend to believe him. You seem to retort, "but that's contract law!". But those are contracts protecting intellectual property.
Postgres, sqlite, BSD, and clang are BSD-licensed open source. But many more projects are GPL-licensed, and thus depend entirely on IP law, than those that aren't. Without IP law protections, those GPL projects compete on an unlevel playing field with companies that would otherwise be free to capitalize on all their work without contributing anything back.
Finally, of the list of YC companies here: http://yclist.com/, how many take no advantage of IP laws? How many are entirely BSD-licensed open source? How many have no trade secrets?
IP-based startups (and their lawyers) defending IP laws is similar to big agriculture (and their lobbyists) defending farm subsidies. Yes, they will be affected by the change, but if they don't even bother to try and make an argument as to why society would be worse off under a different system then why would you listen to them?
Though personally once you've used the phrase "Intellectual Property" the game is already over. The various things people lump under that heading are so broad and disparate that you might as well just say "laws need changing" and counter with "we need laws". That's not even getting into the fact that you're implicitly accepting that you're talking about a form of property, rather than government regulation and monopoly grants.
I assume you include every manufacturer of goods that has a patent as "IP-based startups"as well? Patents are IP. Just because you don't like Angry Birds or some other app maker getting rich doesn't mean IP is bad.
Could it use reform? Heck yeah. But your view is no better than the supposed lawyers you hate against.
>That doesn't sound like any of the standard copyright/patent/trademark/trade-secret categories, it sounds like it has something to do with (probably implied) contracts.
If they copy code it's copyright infringement (often even if they wrote it!, depends on the contracts). If they copy model details it can be copyright, design rights and sometimes trademark and even patents. If they copy technical working features that were patented then they would be in violation unless they were the sole rights holder. If they exploit secrets they learnt in the course of working in the company they would be breaching trade-secret laws.
And yes, most likely they'd be breaching contractual agreements in addition. But the GP's description sounds exactly like the sort of thing protected by IP law.
IANA(Patent)L but have worked previously for several years in IP.
>>one does not have open source - one has freeware.
This is actually wrong, one then has PD. Freeware is still protected by copyright law and unless an additional license is given can't normally be commercially exploited, nor could I claim authorship, etc..
>What is observed to happen when/where such laws don't exist or are generally ignored?
It's hard to tell, there are barely a handful of countries that do not have IP law. For example the Paris Convention (patents) has 173 countries signed up, the Berne Convention (copyright) has 164 (Wikipedia figures; out of 190ish countries).
I'm with the GP I find IP law vital but in desperate need of reform.
These laws are so built into the fabric of the startup
world that we normally just take them for granted.
You're trying to defend something without considering the opportunity cost of it. I can understand why - you don't know what the opportunity cost is. None of us do. But that doesn't make your defence valid.
If the government gave people privilege for howling at the moon, there would be a startup scene around it. That's not a defence of the policy.
For example, no startup could hope to survive without
laws protecting trade secrets
That blanket statements is false. Even if it were true, there are mechanisms that predate conceptions of IP that can be used to defend trade secrets, particularly contract.
Startups depend heavily on IP laws.
Only some do. And then there are a raft of startups that can't and don't exist as a result of IP laws.
Here is an absolutely excellent cross section of the startup world, consisting primarily of early-stage companies, a subset of a larger population of companies that vied against each other to gain a position on the list:
Of the companies on this list, make an argument as to the percentage of them that would be viable in a world where copyright on source code wasn't enforceable, where there was no trade secret law and publication of company secrets was thus protected under the First Amendment, and where any element of content on any web page reachable on the Internet could be freely lifted and used by any other company.
'If the system changes, then it produces a different set of results'
I could use my godlike powers to create a true democracy, a dictatorship or a theocracy. Different people would raise to the top in each case.
Pointing to the people who have risen to the top for any one of those and saying 'if you changed the system, none of those people would be there' is simply a trivial truism, it is not an argument for not changing the system.
I already understood that he wanted to change the question so that he could answer it more easily. But I asked a pretty specific question, and I'm curious about the answer. There's a lot of companies on this list. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if most of them didn't rely on IP protections, someone would have called me out on it already.
Conclusion: most YC companies are significantly dependent on IP laws to operate.
Its widely accepted that where an absence of evidence exists, it is logically and scientifically reasonable to come to a conclusion based on an individual's personal bias.
There is a set of things A that can be done under the current system. There is a different set of things B that could be done without any IP laws. Asking how many items in A are also in B is not a valid way to determine whether A or B is larger.
That said, I haven't heard of most of the companies on that list. The ones I have heard of, would all probably do fine (or, as well as under the current system).
where there was no trade secret law and publication of company secrets was thus protected under the First Amendment
The first amendment just means the government can't censor you.
If your implications are correct and your argument sound, then you're saying that tech startups are in a market that only has value due to legislation. Without that legislation, you're saying the tech startup world would have no value and wouldn't thrive or even exist.
I disagree with your claim, but even if it were true, isn't that tantamount to, say, legislation making the sale of automobiles illegal in order to preserve the viability of the horse-drawn wagon market?
Respectfully --- I don't even know who you are, so I can't actually harbor ill will towards you --- but this is batshit. IP law isn't special-purpose legislation. It's among the 17-or-so powers specifically delegated to Congress by Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution, along with things like "maintaining a navy" and "coining money".
I don't understand what part of my argument you're disputing. I never said that the federal government doesn't have the constitutional authority to legislate intellectual property protection. I also never said or hinted that IP law is "special-purpose legislation."
"IP laws are designed to protect all forms of intangible property having commercial value. "
Wrong.
IP laws are designed to ENDOW intangible goods with commercial value by creating artificial scarcities via sanctioned monopolies.
I'm not saying that's good or bad. I'm just pointing out that you're a practicing lawyer lecturing others about "fundamentals" of law that you - fundamentally - don't understand.
"it does seem at first blush that it is only a court’s decision to protect a trademark as “property” that makes the trademarked term economically valuable...Trade secrets and patented inventions, however, reveal the initial cracks in Cohen’s critique...The reason is that inventions, regardless of how they are legally protected, would be valuable even if there were no legal system that protected them..."
"Modern patent theory, as informed by law and economics, understands and embraces this fact. The economic analysis of patent law assumes as one of its basic foundational premises that an invention’s value preexists its legal classification as property in the patent system."
The existence of a contrary view is not in and of itself a contradiction to a point.
I've read that section. I don't believe it to be a contradiction of the parent. If anything, it strongly contributes to the point that alexqgb is making.
The quotes you've strung together appear to make a separate point in rebuttal to alexqgb, but it's selective quoting and I don't think it is a good representation of the flow of the article.
You could present the logic you believe to be valid in the post, and then cite where appropriate.
--
travisp: the web system won't let me reply to your next post. I'll try to cover here. I think the distinction is this. When the paper is talking about pre-existing value for something, it describes value to the holder of it for the purpose of their purpose. For example, you write some software, you get to use it in your business for the purpose you generated it for. it has value to you. Whereas when alex is talking about commercial value, he/she is talking about value in the marketplace where you can get paid for something.
OK, next bit. The choice of language changes - one voices it in a way that appears virtuous, preventing those darstardly freeloaders. The other focusses on the mechanism by which this prevented: creating artificial scarcity. It's the same thing. It's easy for advocates of IP to lean on the idea that freeloading is wrong and evil as a foregone conclusion. It's not.
The paper you linked to is complicated and involved, and if you feel it contradicts Alex so strongly as to call him out as you did, it would help for you to make the points yourself and to cite. I realise you were echoing the parent.
I deleted it because I didn't think it was worth expanding on to sufficiently make the point in this place. I don't claim to be an expert in this field, I simply wanted to point out that as I understood it, grellas was not fundamentally misunderstanding the fundamentals of the law, as alexqgb claims. In this sense, the existence of a contrary view (putting aside whether this paper is contrary) would in part be a contradiction to alexqgb's point about grellas. If an article in a respected law review did agree with grellas, alexqgb would certainly be in error to make the claims about grellas that he does. I will accept that I may have made an error in my analysis. Although I'm not convinced I misread the above paper, I don't wish to spend the rest of my night defending this in some likely to not be read comment thread :-). If I was unfair to you, alexqgb, I'm sorry.
To provide a brief defense of what I wrote, the paper I cited heavily relies on Lockean property theory in defence of IP, which goes against the idea of IP laws being designed to give intangible goods with commercial value. Like tangible property laws, intangible property laws are designed to protect that which is rightfully yours as a result of your labor, as I understand it.
For example, "If a man establishes a business and makes it valuable by his skill and attention,
the good will of that business is recognized by the law as property. If he adopts and publicly uses a trade mark, he has a remedy, either at law or in equity, against those who undertake to use it without his permission." (2022, quotation of 1984 court case). The man running the business created the commercial value, which is then protected by the government (and therefore, yes, more valuable).
And, "he need not argue that the right of the inventor is a high property; it is the fruit of his mind—it belongs to him more than any other property—he does not inherit it—he takes it by no man’s gift—it peculiarly belongs to him, and
he ought to be protected in the enjoyment of it." (2023, quotation from 1824 in the House of Representatives)
"Circuit Justice Grier and District Judge Dickerson found Webster’s argument compelling because they and other jurists agreed with the Lockean principle that the patent laws secure an inventor’s right to “enjoy the fruits of his invention.” " (2024, referring to an 1871 court case). And what are the fruits of his invention if not, at least in part, commercial value?
Interestingly, the author then notes that the use of identifying patent infringers as pirates "who stole from inventors the valuable fruits of their labors" goes back to 19th century courts.
To me, this does not sound like "IP laws are designed to ENDOW intangible goods with commercial value by creating artificial scarcities via sanctioned monopolies." But perhaps I'll leave this to the legal experts now.
And of course this must be true at least in part because the inventor of a device or the author of a program can herself benefit from her work without ever publishing it or exposing it to the world. She makes less money, of course, but then, the reason she makes more money today by publishing is that IP law clears a path for her to do so.
Not wrong at all, @travisp. The (excellent) paper you cite refers to economic value. What I referred to was commercial value. These are not synonyms. Often, they're antonyms. In many ways, their opposition represents the crux of the issue.
The Groklaw post summed it up nicely by saying "That's what protection means. It means protection from innovation. Let's call a spade a spade."
The only sense in which IP law directly "protects" intangible goods themselves (as opposed to the economic interests of their rights holders) is when it hinders their obsolescence.
> For example, no startup could hope to survive without laws protecting trade secrets.
Existing theft and trespassing laws already outlaw unauthorized physical access to your property. As for disgruntled or opportunistic employees, you can utilize existing contract law to ensure their doing so is illegal. What exactly do trade secret laws cover that aren't covered by more reasonable and fundamental laws?
> Open source is no exception. It relies heavily on rules of copyright law and on licensing to make its system work. If everything were freely shareable without any form of restriction, one does not have open source - one has freeware.
That's why I have strong feelings that the free software movement, or at least the GPL, is insanely contradictory. Their claim is that there shouldn't be liberty restrictions placed on software, but what they really mean is there should be different liberty restrictions placed on software, specifically the ones they happen to like more. In my opinion, software isn't really free unless it's in the public domain (or, nearly equivalently, if there were no longer any intellectual property protection for software).
Most of your points are simply that removing the various forms of intellectual property protection would harm some people. The validity of your specific examples are variously debatable, but even if you're right, I don't think that's a good enough argument for keeping the laws around. I can't conceive of any legal modification that wouldn't harm someone. In my opinion, even if something might harm startups (and I'm certainly not convinced that IP laws are vital to startups), that's not a sufficient argument.
If I break into your office, steal your secret source code, and give a copy to my brother, what part of "existing theft and trespassing laws" prevent him from selling that copy to the highest bidder?
> Their claim is that there shouldn't be liberty restrictions placed on software, but what they really mean is there should be different liberty restrictions placed on software, specifically the ones they happen to like more.
Of course there are different takes on this issue, but you make it sound as thought the GPL is a conspiracy by Stallman. The FOSS ecosystem encompasses a wide array of types of and takes on "freedom" and there is a place for all the different licenses developers can choose from to open source their code.
>As for disgruntled or opportunistic employees, you can utilize existing contract law to ensure their doing so is illegal.
The current laws include some protections for the individual inventor/creator which would be wiped out by this sort of thing. For example (in Europe at least) fair compensation for an inventor even when their work is covered as "work for hire".
(GPL-style) Open Source only relies on copyright because of how guarantees of reciprocal freedom are currently tacked on top of it (it is a hack).
It should not be too hard to imagine 'implementing' it in a different way.
Such as through a specific law that required giving users access to the source code (and other freedoms, possibly extending to derivative works) if a certain piece of software were marked as Open Source (or for all software, as Stallman would probably prefer it).
(yes this might make Open Source software a less attractive alternative, as it would be competing against free as in a free lunch, but as the market-landscape would be changed in favor of FOSS production models as well, by this, and FOSS has certain benefits even if produced for a fee (ability to hire competing firms for implementing fixes and modifications), there are good reasons to assume FOSS would still flourish)
It keeps surprising me how otherwise intelligent/educated people don't see this option...
Peititio principii. Many argue that even the phrase "intellectual property" is disingenuous; a term invented by the entrenched stakeholders to gain support for the laws they would like passed by creating a false analogy between physical property and knowledge.
While I'm not sure where the phrase itself came about, John Locke back in the 1600s endorsed copyright in "Liberty of the Press" as the "property" of the authors and proposed an amendment to British Parliament in 1695 to "secure the author's property in his copy, or his to whom he has transferred it." (See "Lockean Property Theory and Intellectual Property" in http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1457848)
This implies that the idea of intangible property has existed since at least the 1600s and was supported by one of the most important property theorists of history. I don't think you can dismiss it so easily as a simple "false analogy" or that calling patents and copyrights "property" is some sort of modern rhetorical invention.
The description of ideas as property doesn't need to be a modern concept for one to believe that the concept has led society astray, or that the analogy between tangible property and intangible ideas is more heavily abused now than in the past.
Even if one disagrees with the notion of abolishing all intellectual property laws[1], there is value to Groklaw's argument against them. An extreme point of view can serve to anchor the discussion closer to what one might consider ideal (e.g. a hypothetical "founders' copyright," with 14/28 year terms, or n-year patent terms where n is << today).
[1] I have to admit I am intensely curious what the world would look like if suddenly all IP laws were abolished. I imagine there would be a brief frenzy of copying and exploiting, but eventually a new equilibrium would be achieved and innovation would continue but under some other motivation.
>I have not seen any empirical evidence to suggest that IP laws are necessary other than what people said.
Suppose I take http://libregamewiki.org and copy it completely (logos, attributions and all) and put it up on the .com address. Remove the license and puts some ads on there.
You'd just say "oh well, fairplay"??
Your LibertyGaming blog pages too use CC-BY, that only works because you have control via copyright law, without copyright law I can use your content without any attribution or say by you.
Personally I don't think it's morally right to profit from others hard work. Are you saying that you're licensing me to use any intellectual property you create or hold?
I think you need to qualify your argument somewhat; almost all companies across the globe profit from their employees hard work. If they didn't the company would quickly cease to exist.
Yes, it's a rather poor and limited statement which in the basic reading I wouldn't support - I clearly profit from others work on electricity generation, computer development, ..., etc., etc., etc..
Companies profit from their employees and some even are fair about remunerating their employees.
It is unfair remuneration or profit in which the profit shifts markedly away from content creators which I can't endorse.
In this limited scenario the GP was effectively asking why I didn't rip him off. I didn't want to get into the depths of it, in short it's because I think that it would be immoral of me to take his work and without adding any value take away any possible "profit" from him. Such profit includes the ability to spread his moral ethos with regard to copyright as well recognition as a content creator and enabler for free-libre content and of course financial benefit as well.
No, I don't really care. I am a supporter of copyfree, but I can't make my wiki public domain, not without asking people to relicense their contribution.
It is easy to pick some extremes of flawed implementation of IP laws and to ridicule their effects. Software patents have been seriously abused to block innovation, with the prototypical troll being, in effect, the equivalent of some lawyer sitting in a back room endlessly "conceiving" ideas from which extortion-style demands can be exacted. So too with things like the RIAA-led lawsuits demanding millions in damages for the downloading of 20 songs or the Disney-inspired extensions of copyright terms to ridiculous lengths having nothing to do with protection of any conceivable right of an author. Such items can readily and rightly be mocked and cast as the absurd anti-innovative creatures that they are. Nor does it help that the beneficiaries of such legal aberrations are often large and powerful companies, lawyers and lobbyists, and others who might be characterized as the antithesis of innovation in any productive society.
That said, IP laws do not in any sense categorically block innovation and, indeed, remain essential to it.
To understand the true importance of IP laws, we need to look at fundamentals. Property is both tangible and intangible. You can touch the former and physically transfer it to someone else. It is a thing that is possessed by someone and such possession excludes or limits possession by others because it is a finite resource that can only be shared so much. In the modern age, in contrast, intangible property is capable of almost infinite replication with few, if any, incremental costs. The temptation exists, then, to say that all such property should be commonly shared because it can be so shared and because people will use it to make advancements for the betterment of themselves and society. In other words, there presumably is no cost to making all information free, legally unprotected, and infinitely shareable. Or so the thinking goes.
But this assumption is not sound.
IP laws are designed to protect all forms of intangible property having commercial value. This means patents (which protect inventions), copyrights (which protect any tangible embodiment of an original work of authorship), trademarks (which protect the distinctiveness of the origin of goods or services), and trade secrets (which protect any form of valuable confidential and proprietary information).
These laws are so built into the fabric of the startup world that we normally just take them for granted.
For example, no startup could hope to survive without laws protecting trade secrets. Without such laws, whatever information or knowledge base you have in your startup that is unique and valuable could be lifted at will by any passing person: an employee who passes through and copies such information wholesale to give it to a competitor; the janitor who comes in at night who decides to publish it on the internet; someone who breaks into your network, copies it all, and then shares it with the world or, worse, if it is a competitor, who uses it to compete against you. If you once take the legal position that all information is free and freely shareable, then all protections for your confidential business plans, for your technical innovations, for your execution strategy, for your database of key customers, personnel, marketing data, etc. evaporate and you can no longer derive any competitive advantage from any of this as long as anyone gets his hands on it and makes it public.
Founder groups would have the same problem in pre-formation situations. Say, four founders build something that they have worked on for a full year and are prepared to launch. One of them defects and says to the group, "I am going to take everything that we have worked on and take it for myself." Of course, that is outrageous. Buy why? Because laws exist that declare it illegal for someone to misappropriate what the founders have been working on. Those are IP laws. They protect the interests in intangible property. Without them, every founder would be vulnerable to such defections, without any form of legal recourse.
Copyright serves a similar function. Whenever a startup relies on proprietary code, it is copyright (along with trade secret laws) that ensures that the work product of the company can't simply be lifted at will and used in any way that the person taking the code desires.
Open source is no exception. It relies heavily on rules of copyright law and on licensing to make its system work. If everything were freely shareable without any form of restriction, one does not have open source - one has freeware.
I could go on with this but, having already noted the potential for serious abuse when such laws are ill-formed, I think I have said enough to show that IP laws lie at the foundation of the startup world and are not in themselves the enemy. There are philosophical arguments to be made that all information should be freely shareable but any society based on that premise would be radically different from the one in which startups thrive today.
Startups depend heavily on IP laws. Such laws have great value in today's startup culture and ought to be recognized for that contribution. Reform them, absolutely; abolish them, don't even think about it (unless you are ready to embrace a philosophically extreme position about all forms of intangible property ownership). I don't believe most people are prepared to embrace the extreme position and, hence, one ought to be careful about castigating that which is good while condemning that which we can agree is bad.
Bottom line: IP laws do not kill innovation and, on the contrary, are vital to it. Flawed IP laws stink and need to be reformed.