You wrote: > Okay, I'm going to a pull an RMS and plead for a change in our > collective use of certain terms. > > If you share either of these perspectives, then you might also wish to > help restore sanity to modern discussions of intellectual property law by > not referring to allegedly infringing materials or actions as "illegal".
Thanks for the thoughtful essay. Since you're "pulling an RMS" you might reconsider using the term "intellectual property" in the context of combining disparate areas of law (like patents and copyrights). You could have said "modern discussions of copyright law" above, for example. But this is not to take away from an interesting read. RMS has lectured on the topic and (to my way of thinking) said similarly thought provoking things. See http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/stallman-patents.html for a transcript of one lecture where he addresses the problem. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#IntellectualProperty is a brief description of the problem of using that term outside the context of critiquing its use.
