[A2k] L&E and DRM/ TPMs

[Richard M Stallman]

    People who physically labour to produce food for the world to eat have no
    market power, their inputs that are IP-laden,

It bad indeed that seeds and plants are patented, but you have chosen
a very misleading way to describe that fact.  To refer to patents as
"IP" works against our cause.

See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html for more explanation.

      The
    final price of any consumer product typically shows the fat to be in IP,
    marketing, adminstration and retail,

Copyrights, patents, and trademarks do different things.  Lumping them
together, as the term "IP" does, makes a statement so general that it
isn't useful or pertinent.

    The majority of people in the world are too poor to purchase
    intellectual property,

I think you mean to say that they are "too poor to purchase authorized
copies of copyrighted works."  Is that right?

The majority of people in the world have surely never considered
buying a copyright or a patent.  (My understanding is that trademarks
cannot be separately bought or sold.)

Using the term "intellectual property" to confuse copyrights, patents,
trademarks, and some other monopolies is commonplace.  Your statement
adds a second level of confusion, between those legal privileges and
the goods that they restrict.  So in addition to confusing copyright
with other unrelated laws, it then presents a mistaken picture of
all of them.

I don't think that we need to confuse or misrepresent copyright law
and patent law in order to make people angry at the injustices of
copyright law, or the (different) injustices of patent law.  I do both
of these things often and without mixing them up.  You can, too.