Two points against Intellectual property laws

[sam h]

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My original point was that this legal apparatus girding trade secrets through enforcing NDAs is part of governmental IP protection, and my understanding was that in your post you were saying that trade secrets were not really legally protected by IP laws.

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They are protected though civil apparatus, just as any other contract is. Torts. Which can easily exist outside of a monopoly dispute resolution organization.

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They are protected by the legal apparatus. It might be civil law, but its not non-governmental.

Whether such an apparatus could exist outside government is just a snoozer of an argument that has been rehashed on these boards a million times and is not really relevant. The point is that in the world today, when governments don't protect IP in this way, there is no other apparatus. That's just the empirical fact about countries like Russia. Therefore, firms don't invest. Ergo, getting rid of these protections is probably a bad idea for most countries.

[pvn]

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Whether such an apparatus could exist outside government is just a snoozer of an argument that has been rehashed on these boards a million times and is not really relevant. The point is that in the world today, when governments don't protect IP in this way, there is no other apparatus. That's just the empirical fact about countries like Russia. Therefore, firms don't invest. Ergo, getting rid of these protections is probably a bad idea for most countries.

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I agree with this. Regions in the world today, right now, where governments do not protect IP generally are areas where governmnets do not protect *property* at all, and where there is no widespread respect for property in the first place. These are generally bad areas not only for economic investment, but just about any other civilized activity.