The "intellectual property" misnomer

[Peter Hansen]

Ben Finney wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 12 Jul 2003 04:29:04 GMT, Raymond Hettinger wrote:
> > In layman's terms, it means exactly what Guido said.
> 
> The layman's understanding of "intellectual property" is confused,
> doesn't relate to reality, and is harmful.  Please avoid use of that
> term.

You've already stated clearly your belief (Are you a lawyer?
No?  So it's merely a belief, right? a personal opinion.)
that the term "intellectual property" has no legal meaning,
therefore "layman's" in the above is redundant.  The result
is that you are saying in effect that the term "intellectual 
property" is wrong for everyone on the planet and that no one 
can have a useful meaning for it and therefore must avoid its use.
One might almost expect you to claim copyright on the phrase and
refuse to license its reproduction to the rest of us. ;-)

As far as I'm concerned, "intellectual property" *has* a useful
meaning, though an ambiguous one (as intended, no doubt), and 
Guido used it in a way which communicated *to me* (as he intended
it to communicate to people like me) certain information.  There's
no need in non-legal documents to avoid ambiguity and in fact 
there's a lot of advantage in using it.  Think of it as a Pythonic
approach to communication: it's not rigorously defined, yet
it works!

You may not like the term, but I got something useful out of 
that use of it, as was intended, and I might feel somewhat 
offended by your telling me and everyone else on the planet that
we should avoid it when *we* believe it communicates something
useful, and effectively.

-Peter