Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter (now X) and Square (now Block), sparked a weekend’s worth of debate around intellectual property, patents, and copyright, with a characteristically terse post declaring, “delete all IP law.”
X’s current owner Elon Musk quickly replied, “I agree.”
Musk saying something doesn’t reflect on the quality of the idea itself. For many thousands of years people freely imitated whatever they saw that worked, in a process known as “the spread of civilization”, which turned out pretty well for humans. At some point somebody figured out they could get rich by selling copies of other people’s work and paying them a pittence, aka “royalty”, and boom, IP laws were born, and so was the concept that imitation = “stealing”. So now you’re evil if you rub two sticks together without paying somebody - unless they’re evil, then you’re fighting for social justice. It all makes so much sense.