I think about the competition of rights (and perceived rights) a lot. Rights infringing on others rights.
Reading about Monsanto in the distant past, I came upon an extreme example of what I consider the abuse of IP. To greatly simplify the story: some of their patented seeds blew over from one farm, that of a Monsanto customer, into a another farm, that of a holdout. Monsanto discovered some of their copyrighted crops on this holdout's farm and promptly sued him.
Apologies to to Mr Kinsella in advance: this feels wrong.
It may have been on this forum that I read about Hungary using its military to destroy some crops that popped up from GMO seeds blown across the border. Probably posted by Medium Tex or Pointed Stick. I want to say they used tanks with flamethrowers to raze the crops but that may be my imagination creating a false memory.
That really feels like an immoral use of IP enforcement even if it currently works in the courtroom because it's messing with how a farmer physically deals with his own farm, and because the crops arrived passively through no fault of his own. It's like trespassing and then suing for a slip & fall.
I don't feel this way about someone wanting to steal video content and disseminate it to friends and strangers willy nilly.
However, I'm not a lawyer, and I don't know how to argue against IP in the first example and for it in the latter. I don't know the precedents, and I can't think of some universal distinction or criterion that would divide them.
