I think that IP is one of the largest issues going and to make it worse, people don’t know anything about it. That’s what makes it so dangerous. Corporations are slowly but surely gathering more and more power over IP, many people think that this is good for businesses because they can protect their interests, but that’s not really what IP is about. IP is more about anti-competitive behavior than anything right now. It is being abused by crooks who extort money from businesses by claiming overly broad and obvious copyrights granted by people who don’t understand the concepts they are certifying. It is also being used by larger companies to lock out newcomers. An example of this is Vonage being sued by Verizon. It is also used to try and kill derivative works, like The Grey Album, by Danger Mouse. Stifling creativity not just in the art but in the sciences as well. IP is used to create artificial monopolies, like MLB saying people can’t disseminate the facts (which are currently not part of IP) of a baseball without authorization. But worse of all it is abused by people who just want to silence others, the DMCA for example has been widely abused to do just that.
IP laws need to be reformed so that they are balanced, so that they protect people first and businesses second. I don’t want to win second place to an artificial person (ie corporation).
