I recommend that you read the
2020 essay by Cory Doctorow simply titled "IP". As in "Intellectual Property".
It's about law, technology, freedom, and more.
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
“IP is any law that I can invoke that allows me to control the conduct of my competitors, critics, and customers.”
"Some 40 years later, the world is a very different place. Between software copyrights, anti-circum*vention rules, software patents, enforceable terms of service, trade secrecy, non-compete agreements, and the pending (at the time of this writing) Oracle/Google dispute over API copyrights, any attempt to interoperate with an existing product service with*out permission from its corporate master is a legal suicide mission, an invitation to almost unlimited civil – and even criminal! – litigation. That is to say: if you dare to modify, improve, or replace an existing, dominant software-based product or service, you risk bankruptcy and a long prison sentence."
"You may have heard Netscape founder Marc Andrees*sen’s famous phrase: “Software is eating the world.” It’s not quite true. Software has eaten the world.
Past tense.
If there was any doubt, the pandemic erased it. Locked down, viewing the world through our screens, there is no longer any distinction between human rights and digital rights. There is no software freedom. There’s only freedom.
Software is expanding relentlessly into every device and system, from ventilators to tractors, from toothbrushes to sex-toys, from refrigerator filters to money itself. Wherever we find software, we find “IP” – that is, software deployed to control the conduct of competitors, critics, and customers, in such a way that overlapping systems of laws can be invoked to punish anyone who bypasses that software."
He makes many other good points. Now shower me in good karma.