> Clumping together widely separate areas of law like copyright, trademark, patent, and trade secrets and casting it as something related to physical property is great if you want to deceive people, but very bad if your intent is to educate and help people understand the aforementioned areas of law.

Ignoring the structure of actually related areas of law, as ditching intellectual property as a category would be doing, is great if you want to deceive people, but very bad if your intent is to educate and help people understand the law.

IP is a subcategory of intangible personal property, which is a subcategory of personal property, which is a subcategory of property. There are legal principles that are generally applicable to property, others that apply to personal (as opposed to real) property, others that apply to intangible (as opposed to tangible) personal property, etc.

IP isn't particularly closely related to "physical property" (which isn't a particularly useful category); nor does the term suggest that it is. Real property is in a separate branch from IP at the highest level of categorization of property rights, and tangible personal property is at the next level down. It is more closely related to things like debts and choses in action (rights to sue), which are, while not IP, also intangible personal property.

I get that Stallman preached and so it must be, but I've never understood why I should care. It's just a hamfisted attempted for the pro-GPL crowd to define terms the way they want, so that the debate can be framed in a friendly manner.

But you are failing miserably to frame the debate in any way whatsoever. If you genuinely want to help your developers understand copyright law as this subthread suggests we do, why needlessly confuse things? Why not frame it as what it is, a debate about copyright law? A lot of developers I work with have a really hard time seeing where one area of law begins and where another one ends, and this isn't helping. This is not just bad for the idealist in me, this is also bad for the entrepreneur in me, who has a harder time running a efficient and profitable organization as a result.

And there's no need to make it an us-vs-them issue. Nobody is defining terms to fit their agenda, criticism of IP is simply pointing to differences that are already codified in law. So if you don't like it, take it up with your legislators. You don't have to be either for or against copyleft to want say the big scary copy-r-word to your developers. Even the most ardent copyleft haters and copyright abolitionism idealists are shooting themselves in the foot when they make snide remarks toward lawyers about their "legalese", before they know it reality will catch up with them and they'll be hit with overly broad patent suits or some jerk will infringe on their trademarks.

Reasons are listed in the comment you replied to: they're different areas of law, with different mechanics. Details matter. Yes, it also helps the pro-GPL crowd. That's not an argument against it (nor for it). An argument against would be to argue how some similarity among them makes it relevant to consider them all together.