Post
Topic
Board Legal
Re: Are Bitcoin's virtual property?
by
reyals
on 14/12/2012, 15:35:43 UTC
Of course a song can be property; a copyright is part of intellectual property law.
The term intellectual property is quite a fix.

From the wiki page:
Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman argues that, although the term intellectual property is in wide use, it should be rejected altogether, because it "systematically distorts and confuses these issues, and its use was and is promoted by those who gain from this confusion." He claims that the term "operates as a catch-all to lump together disparate laws [which] originated separately, evolved differently, cover different activities, have different rules, and raise different public policy issues" and that it creates a "bias" by confusing these monopolies with ownership of limited physical things, likening them to "property rights".[33] Stallman advocates referring to copyrights, patents and trademarks in the singular and warns against abstracting disparate laws into a collective term.

A song is to be protected by copyright.
Oh please RMS is one step above internet troll (even if he is a troll on our side). It's like quoting Rush Limbaugh.
If we're sticking with wiki as a soruce

Modern usage of the term intellectual property goes back at least as far as 1867 with the founding of the North German Confederation whose constitution granted legislative power over the protection of intellectual property (Schutz des geistigen Eigentums) to the confederation.[4] When the administrative secretariats established by the Paris Convention (1883) and the Berne Convention (1886) merged in 1893, they located in Berne, and also adopted the term intellectual property in their new combined title, the United International Bureaux for the Protection of Intellectual Property. The organisation subsequently relocated to Geneva in 1960, and was succeeded in 1967 with the establishment of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) by treaty as an agency of the United Nations. According to Lemley, it was only at this point that the term really began to be used in the United States (which had not been a party to the Berne Convention),[2] and it did not enter popular usage until passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980.[5]

Intellectual Property has been an accepted term for over 100 years.  If he wants to argue aginst certain abuses of IP that's all well and good but arguing aginst the term is just nonsesne.


And I'm not even sure what point you're trying to make...
Do you think that bitcoins aren't property or are you just trying to argue something else at this point?