It's not useless, knowledge grows with related knowledge, I take your company's top secret spaceship fusion warp drive knowledge and build a terrestrial power plant that uses that technology to create free electricity... I expressed it differently so I didn't breach any IP rights you had.

This kind of stuff happens all the time... Patents, are where this gets frustrating, where I can register a bunch of "expressions" of an idea and they get protected from execution... Then Software-patents are even worse in this realm...

I think that argument gets stuck on language. "Knowledge" is not a single, atomic thing. If I have warp drive "knowledge" that has been claimed by someone else, then there are two non-mutually-exclusive options:

- I have the knowledge of how to integrate a fusion plant and warp motor to form a warp drive. The only purpose of this knowledge is a warp drive, therefore I cannot express it.

- I have the knowledge of the fusion plant, and a warp motor, both of which are claimed. I cannot build the fusion plant even if I intend to integrate it with a terrestial power grid. I cannot build a warp motor even if I intend to integrate it with solar cells. There's no other purpose for any of this, so I am forbidden from expressing it.

I'm not seeing another way to define "knowledge" that would allow me to express it despite it being claimed by someone else, so I conclude IP makes knowledge useless.