Intellectual property

Cory Doctorow has an interesting take on Intellectual Copyright that is well worth reading, basically he says its a sham. You can't and shouldn't copyright knowledge/information as aside from the obvious creative stagnation it fosters where can the limits be placed? Harry Potter after all was a concoction of every wizard story that was ever told...

WIPO's (World Intellectual Property Organization) 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.