Debunking Microsoft's anti-Right-to-Repair FUD.

Bravo for the article, but one quotation falls into a widespread confusion: that spread by the term "intellectual property".

and "If you hire a managed service provider to do your network security they could, instead,... steal your intellectual property."

In general, that statement is false. It could not steal your copyrights, or your patents, or your trademarks, or your plant variety monopolies, or your IC mask monopolies, or your publicity rights — those are legal privileges, so they can't be "stolen". I think the only things it could possibly steal that way are trade secrets.

Please don't ever say "intellectual property" if what you mean is "trade secrets"". or if what you mean is "copyrights", or if what you mean is any other specific thing, because that is a big generalization. It is likely to convert a narrow true statement into a broad false one.

If you think that what you mean is all of them, then please study the issue more carefully — a statement so general is usually false, and probably most of them are not even relevant to the issue at hand.

If you want to quote a statement where someone else used the term "intellectual property", please check whether the statement was false due to this confusion. Any statement that used that term probably was confused.