Discussion
Digital rights activists have long railed at the use of the term "IP," criticizing it for being deceptively imprecise and also rhetorically dishonest. I get where these objections are coming from, but I think they're misguided.
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https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/28/cost-of-everything/#value-of-nothing
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The story he told me included stuff like the topiary being plastic, foul-mouthed midgets portraying lovable characters, electrified fences to shock the snot out of the kin of Bambi to unwelcome them, hordes of workers repainting everything with sugar-based paint every night, the secret passages used to medically evacuate geezers who pass out in the heat ... The same kind of juxtaposition of fantasy and stark realism invoked by your title.
Start with "deceptively imprecise." "IP" covers a lot of legal ground, from the "big three" of copyright, trademark and patent, to a whole arcane bestiary: anticircumvention, noncompete, trade secrecy, nondisparagement, database and publicity rights, and more. Each of these has a radically different policy basis and radically different contours.
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Take copyright and trademark. Copyright is designed to allow companies (and the creators they hire or contract with) to commercially exploit creative works. In the US, copyright is a creature of the Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8:
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C8-3-2/ALDE_00013064/
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Fun fact: there are only two clauses in the Constitution that include a rationale: the Second Amendment ("A well regulated Militia") and the copyright clause ("To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"). Everything else is one of those "truths" that the framers "held to be self-evident." In these two cases, they decided to explain their thinking.
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So the point of copyright is to incentivize investment in creative works, and its mechanism is a set of limited rights over those works, for limited times. Copyright expires, and it is subject to "limitations and exceptions," including "fair use," a very broad set of highly situational rights to use works even if the rightsholder objects:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/07/aimsters-revenge/#effective-means-of-access-control
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Take copyright and trademark. Copyright is designed to allow companies (and the creators they hire or contract with) to commercially exploit creative works. In the US, copyright is a creature of the Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8:
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C8-3-2/ALDE_00013064/
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@pluralistic
I see you mentioned writing about the Magic Kingdom. I wonder if you have ever seen the newspaper feature written about Disneyworld (FL) written by my friend Richard Abrams back in its earliest days. He was working for one of the papers in Miami or Tampa/St Pete and was one of the first (or perhaps the first) journalists to be allowed behind the scenes there. He told me the story of what he saw, and it was quite entertaining, but I never saw the piece. But he told me that the article earned him a letter from Disney conferring a lifetime ban from the premises.