If you were to form a community around the idea of independence, then the community should take proactive measures to combat the tendency of individuals' profit over group independence; group independence is necessary to defend its members' independence.

"A true democracy is founded on a peace treaty that has property rights as its foundation. We must agree on who owns what and how it is transferred among us. Intellectual property is a class of virtual property that includes copyright, trademarks, patents, and trade secrets. The question we must consider is how should intellectual property be defined, allocated, and made transferable and for how long?

I am going to recommend that a true democracy should not recognize intellectual property based upon the arguments in a number of books.

The premise of a true democracy is developing a peace treaty and then enforcing that treaty by maintaining your independence. The goal is to decentralize power and avoid creating dependence upon others. Intellectual property serves to centralize power and create dependence. It authorizes one person to have a monopoly over an idea and the rest of society is now dependent upon this person.

If you were to form a community around the idea of independence then the community would be taking proactive measures to combat the tendency of individuals to put personal profit over group independence, group independence being necessary for the group to defend the independence of its members. Such a community would not allow itself to become dependent upon any single point of failure. From this perspective, a community would not purchase any technology or art from a monopoly. In fact, one could argue that technology should not be allowed to be widely distributed until others are able to replicate the idea. In this case, a patent becomes a means of disclosure which enables competition and prevents dependency.

This is in stark contrast to intellectual property laws which grant a monopoly over the use of a technology and anything derived from it. This monopoly then hinders innovation and comes at great expense to society. In fact, I believe the expense to society is greater than the profit to the artificially created monopolist. It would be cheaper to compensate inventors in other ways than to grant them a monopoly."

Author: Daniel Larimer

Source: https://moreequalanimals.com/assets/MoreEqualAnimals-1.15.2021.pdf