Intellectual property is capital. Advocating for communal ownership for the intellectual means of production is more communist than it is capitalist.

The market can then fix it once you've removed intellectual capitalism from the equation.

There are plenty of capitalists who would disagree by arguing that "intellectual property" isn't capital because such thing isn't even possible. Many anarcho-capitalists hold this position. I'm not versed enough to argue it in depth, but the basic premise is that you can't "own" an idea/thought, and there's no scarcity at play with ideas so it fails the basic test for property.

I guess the system worked around that limitation by hiring people with ideas and have them sign NDAs.

Bitcoin is commonly held to be worth something, i.e., an asset. But there are many who argue that its “true” value is 0. Something similar to that divergence is happening here. We, as a society, have a convention, a habit, where copyrighted works, trademarks, mining rights, etc. are restricted by law to be controlled by a single legal entity. This makes these a tradable commodity. But if the law did not apply to these, they would become worthless. It is, in fact, these laws which have created this tradable commodity from nothing. Other laws could be created to do the same to any number of currently freely available things; this does not prove that these things should be covered by such laws merely because it would create a kind of property.

It would be nice if the solution wasn't "restructure society" because if that's true what will really happen is nothing changes.

This is a very dangerous mindset. Copyright is only a couple hundred years old and much younger in many countries. Many parts of modern copyright (notably the infamous DMCA and equivalent non-US laws) were introduced within our lifetimes. We did restructure society but in the wrong direction, lets not pretend we can't fix that.

> The treadmill is powered by "intellectual property". Abolish "owning" ideas, and you abolish the treadmill.

How so?

A lot of devices become obsolete by no longer receiving security and compatibilty updates long before the hardware is unusable.

Exactly. If a single company could not be granted an artificial monopoly over upgrading and repairing a system due to "intellectual property" laws, no company could decide when a device has become EOL. If anyone could maintain a system, anyone would maintain a system.

I'm not sure Chromebooks are the best example of this issue. Last I checked you can install normal Linux on one.

With some caveats. I've run used chromebooks as my only laptop for about 5 or 6 years now. You have to undo write protection (usually a screw on the motherboard) and flash an aftermarket firmware.

Does normal linux provide firmware updates for chromebook-specific hardware?

I never said they were the best example. Nor was that really the sentiment of the comment I originally replied to, or my reply to it.