"Intellectual Property" Is a Silly Euphemism

“Intellectual property” is one of those ideologically loaded terms that can cause an argument just by being uttered. The term wasn’t in widespread use until the 1960s, when it was adopted by the World Intellectual Property Organization, a trade body that later attained exalted status as a UN agency. WIPO’s case for using the term is easy to understand: People who’ve “had their property stolen” are a lot more sympathetic in the public imagination than “industrial entities who’ve had the contours of their regulatory monopolies violated,” the latter being the more common way of talking about infringement until the ascendancy of “intellectual property” as a term of art.

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