Intellectual property laws are seriously busted. Worldwide.

You probably already knew that. Most people have an uncomfortable feeling about laws that are widely broken by reasonable, law-abiding people.

Or, if you didn't already know that, you are quite simply ignorant. Read on and be informed.

Why do I say busted? Well take copyright. There's a growing struggle to bust it. Wikipedia is just part of it. GNU came first.

People hate copyright, and for good reasons. But they probably don't realise just how good those reasons are.

They should hate patent laws even more. At this moment, millions... yes millions... of people are dying from AIDS or cancer or other diseases and could be saved with a few cents worth of medicine. But they are dying. Why?

Because the patent holders want several thousand dollars per month for the medicine. And that's more than these people earn in a year. In some cases, in a lifetime.

I you kill a million people in a gas chamber, you hang for it. If you kill a million people by denying them medical treatment, you get an executive bonus.

Are you feeling less ignorant?

"Patent" means disclose. But patent law requires more than disclosure. It requires that you make the patented information available for use, at a reasonable cost.

A large proportion of the world's medical patents are null and void. Or should be. Because the holders have simply not kept their part of the bargain. And there seems no chance of keeping them to it, because guess who pays the patent lawyers? No, it's not the penniless AIDS and cancer victims.

The only practical solution to the gross, endemic patent fraud that bedevils our world is quite simply to abolish patent law, clean break, and replace it with something effective. And the technology to do that is fairly new but quite robust and readily available. You're using it now.

Does copyright do any better? Short answer is "no". And the solution is the same.

Most of the published music I own contains fraudulent claims of copyright. We call it "copyfraud". It is also endemic. And there is no penalty for posting fraudulent notices saying things like "Please don't photocopy this, it's illegal" when in many circumstances it's perfectly legal and the publishers know this.