[lkilboii] Gossiping "Apple sucks"

You gossip privately to a friend: "Don't buy an Apple iPhone.  It breaks too easily.  There's a reason why it's nicknamed the diePhone."

In spreading these rumors, you cause financial damage to Apple: your friend might not buy an iPhone because of you.  Ignoring the practicalities of capturing the conversation, shouldn't Apple be able to sue you both to recover the damages you've caused and to disincentivize such gossiping?  Certainly Apple owns trademarks on the names "Apple" and "iPhone", and when you used these names in conversation, you have cheapened these brands, the very thing trademarks are supposed to protect.

Of course not: gossip is, and should remain, unregulated, protected by the freedom of speech.  Trademarks may protect some uses of a name, but not this, not in gossip.

This is a counterargument to: copyright infringement by peer-to-peer file-sharing causes harm, so therefore the intellectual property owners must be compensated for it.

Do you feel you are getting away with a crime when gossiping about Apple?  Assuming not, it demonstrates that there is not even a moral foundation for where to draw the property line for intellectual property.  The line has gotten drawn according to who has the most political power, not necessarily what is best for society.

"Harm" ultimately depends on where the property line is drawn.

We've become set in our ways and our thought about intellectual property, unable to imagine something different, unable to imagine that people actually did things differently at other times, and very dangerously, thinking that the current way is the only "right" way of doing it.  The purpose of this essay is to explain how you can think otherwise, how you can imagine how things could be different.