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> Music piracy could be argued to be obtaining a luxury item for free, and that people have no right to do this. The obvious counter-argument being that there'

> Music piracy could be argued to be obtaining a luxury item for free, and that people have no right to do this. The obvious counter-argument being that there's absolutely no moral or philosophical justification for the ownership of information. Intellectual property is nothing but a racket.

stdbrouw 10y ago
So obvious that you don't even feel the need to make the actual argument, it seems.
colejohnson66 10y ago
> Intellectual property is nothing but a racket. It's easy to diregard IP when you don't own any, but if IP didn't exist the big, bad, evil corporations could steal ideas from people with no recourse. In fact, that's exactly what happened with Robert Kearns[0]. He invented the intermittent windshield wiper and attempted to license it to motor companies. They told him no and later implemented intermittent wipers themselves. Sure, you can disregard it as "why does Kearns need to own that idea?" But if it werent for Kearns, we probably wouldn't have intermittenent wipers nowadays. Also, if companies could just steal ideas from other people instead of investing in R&D, why wouldn't they? Sure, IP can be abused, but like the majority of laws, was created with good intentions. Killing IP instead of closing loopholes that allow abuse is attacking the problem, not the cause. Without getting too political, that's the problem the left has with guns and the right has with encryption. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kearns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kearns
- a3_nm 10y ago
  > But if it werent for Kearns, we probably wouldn't have intermittenent wipers nowadays. Probably not the best example, because you could make a strong case that, with intermittent wipers being such a simple invention, probably someone else than Robert Kearns would have thought about it between 1969 and today. It's a balance, of course... However, under today's excessive intellectual property laws, even assuming that Kearns could have successfully protected his idea (because it's not like IP usually favors the small players...), would society really have benefited by limiting the use of this idea (or having everyone pay royalties to Kearns)? Wouldn't plenty of other people, in particular motor companies, come up with the idea "for free" in the 20 years of a patent term anyway? Also, relevant to the original discussion is the fact that the general lack of IP protection for ideas is an important component of free scientific discourse. So science is another situation where the lack of IP laws is arguably a good thing. In this light, when you ask: > if companies could just steal ideas from other people instead of investing in R&D, why wouldn't they? I ask in turn: given that countries can use the research produced by other countries instead of funding their own researchers, why do they do it today?
  - BurningFrog 10y ago
    > probably someone else than Robert Kearns would have thought about it between 1969 and today. Yeah, most great inventions would have been made within a year anyway. The truly great ones maybe in 5 years. That doesn't mean big rewards for the first inventor are wrong. The incentives from that is why so many push for these inventions. The argument that if it wasn't for unions 100 years ago, we'd all still be working 14 hour days is based on a similar fallacy.
    - PhasmaFelis 10y ago
      I don't understand what you mean with the union thing. The innovation that brought about better employer practices was employees discovering collective action, not employers discovering the benefits of being nice.
      - BurningFrog 10y ago
        What brought on higher wages and other more employee friendly practices was economic growth. As it becomes more profitable to have employees, businesses have to pay more to get them. They pay in money but also in other benefits, like shorter working hours. Now, if unions demand improvements during times of economic growth, and get them, they will of course claim they caused them. You're probably not convinced, but that's enough for now :)
  - saltyBuck 10y ago
    > probably someone else than Robert Kearns would have thought about it between 1969 and today. Don't be so sure - delays existed for decades prior, and windshield wipers existed since horse&buggy days - yet nobody realized the importance of combining the two. There is a reason to the saying "everything is obvious in hindsight".
- CamperBob2 10y ago
  But if it werent for Kearns, we probably wouldn't have intermittenent wipers nowadays What would be your reason for believing this?
  - qbrass 10y ago
    Especially since it had already been invented in the UK before Kearns started working on it.
- Kalium 10y ago
  > It's easy to diregard IP when you don't own any, but if IP didn't exist the big, bad, evil corporations could steal ideas from people with no recourse. In practice, they already can, because enforcement is ruinously expensive for individuals. The big, bad, evil corporations abuse IP to shut down individuals and smaller companies. Or just things they don't like competing with them. Witness Samsung and Apple. > Sure, IP can be abused, but like the majority of laws, was created with good intentions. A lot of things start with good intentions. However, we have to concern ourselves with results rather than intents.
- bloatisgood 10y ago
  I would argue that if his IP was protected he would sit on a temporary monpoly and only a handful of car manufacturers that directly license the wipers from him directly could build them. Instead every car manufacturer build them benefiting everyone. Developing IP is expensive but protecting it is even more expensive. Imagine a company invents a cancer curing drug but it cost them 10 billion dollars in R&D. They get their patent but then their competitor spends another 10 billion dollars in R&D to make their own cancer cure that doesn't infringe the previous patent. I think we should have a patent system where when a company creates a patent and it sets the price of the patent to the cost of the R&D (plus some profit) and all buyers will own the patent collectively. The cost is evenly divided across all buyers. Initially the first company that buys the patent pays 10 billion dollars covering the R&D costs. If a competitor buys the patent they will only have to pay 5 billion dollars which then are used to reimburse the first buyer so both only have to pay 5 billion dollars. The third pays 3.33 billion dollars which again are redistributed across the previous buyers. And so on.
tashi 10y ago
One moral justification is that the ability to own and profit from intellectual property gives people a powerful incentive to create and share new things. You seem to be making a statement from first principles: ownership of ideas is absurd. Which, of course, it is. But on the same level of abstraction, who can own land or water or sky? No one. But of course, to "own" these things is an abstraction for a contract created by the societies we're born into, about what you're permitted to do and what happens to people who break the contract. And in that sense, the argument needs to be about what costs and benefits to society, collectively and individually, come with that contract.
- nerdponx 10y ago
  I would tack onto this argument that, in the case of scientific research, the assignment of research intellectual property to journal publishers is a backwards and inappropriate use of intellectual property anyway.
  - a3_nm 10y ago
    Exactly. Research articles are produced with public money, and scientists do not profit financially from their sale, in fact both scientists and the public want scientific articles to be as widely circulated as possible. It then seems completely backwards to use intellectual property to limit "unauthorized" redistribution of articles, in the hope that this would help the "authorized" publisher to circulate the articles...
    - TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
      It's worse than that. The sole contribution of the "publishers" is to make content hard to access - both practically, because you need a university library or a private login, and financially, because either your library has to pay a lot of money, or you do. ($45 for a three page PDF? Please...) While some people try to conflate this with other kinds of IP, this is a completely different process, because research already funded by public money is being kept from the public. Which means anyone who may be interested in research outside of academia - including startups, corporations, and private entrepreneurs - has to pay through the nose for official access. And that simply removes money from the ecosystem and puts it in the pocket of the publishers. It doesn't fund new research, it doesn't increase publishing standards, it doesn't keep food on the table for struggling researchers. It costs a fortune, but adds no social or scientific value at all.
eggy 10y ago
Does this apply to artwork? I ask because a lot of people were upset when Zara, the retail clothing manufacturer, apparently 'pirated' an indie artist's artworks as seen on little appliques on their apparel. It was most likely one of their thousands of graphic designers making squat who found it on the internet, their design manager didn't catch it as a copy of something, and it wound up on their clothing. A fury storm on Twitter with very strong suggestions to take against Zara was being proposed by many. I am sure there were some 'IP is a racket' people among them, but the argument seemed to be a one-way street: IP is free, except if you're a company who profits from it and we don't get our cut.
- mtgx 10y ago
  No. The fashion industry doesn't have copyrights or patents, only trademarks (the brands). This was a great TED talk about it, and about why IP laws in general are bad and how they limit creativity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLUzgWAEGjY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLUzgWAEGjY You may also be interested in the Everything Is A Remix video series, if you haven't seen it already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9ryPC8bxqE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9ryPC8bxqE
PhasmaFelis 10y ago
I don't think that's right. IP laws are currently under the control of some corrupt and greedy people, but there are clear social benefits to having some sort of IP law.
tzs 10y ago
> The obvious counter-argument being that there's absolutely no moral or philosophical justification for the ownership of information. Could you elaborate a bit, because on the face of it that seems to be kind of a ridiculous statement. There is extensive literature on the philosophical justifications for almost all parts of the law, including intellectual property. For IP, there are two or three major philosophical justifications. In Erupoe, an approach based on Hegel's theories of personality is common. In the US, Locke's theories of ownership of one's labor is often used as a justification. Did you mean to say that you do not think that these philosophical justifications are sufficient, rather than that they do not exist?
shandor 10y ago
>there's absolutely no moral or philosophical justification for the ownership of information Are you sure that the whole thing is really that simple? If information cannot be owned in any way, in any case, then don't the Udemy-using pirates from the othe HN story[1] have all the right in the world to do what they are doing? And surely it also means that for example all so called pirate version "China copies" of brands like Nike etc are also completely fine? And it goes deeper than the megacorps. If no one "owns" any information, then no one can dictate how any single piece of it is used. So you don't get to say that NSA/Facebook/some random hacker has "no right" to hack into your emails and sell them to highest bidder. Or if you think you can, please lay out the logic chain leading to that, I wasn't able to come up with one quickly. Finally, blanket statements lile this don't help anyone. I mean...your bank account and its contents are "info" nowadays, bits on some computers somewhere. Bits just like any other piece of digital information in today's world. I think we can safely say that is some information that is only fair to be owned by some, preferably the individual who earned that money. [1]https://www.troyhunt.com/the-piracy-paradox-at-udemy/ https://www.troyhunt.com/the-piracy-paradox-at-udemy/

stdbrouw 10y ago

So obvious that you don't even feel the need to make the actual argument, it seems.

colejohnson66 10y ago

> Intellectual property is nothing but a racket. It's easy to diregard IP when you don't own any, but if IP didn't exist the big, bad, evil corporations could steal ideas from people with no recourse. In fact, that's exactly what happened with Robert Kearns[0]. He invented the intermittent windshield wiper and attempted to license it to motor companies. They told him no and later implemented intermittent wipers themselves. Sure, you can disregard it as "why does Kearns need to own that idea?" But if it werent for Kearns, we probably wouldn't have intermittenent wipers nowadays. Also, if companies could just steal ideas from other people instead of investing in R&D, why wouldn't they? Sure, IP can be abused, but like the majority of laws, was created with good intentions. Killing IP instead of closing loopholes that allow abuse is attacking the problem, not the cause. Without getting too political, that's the problem the left has with guns and the right has with encryption. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kearns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kearns

a3_nm 10y ago
> But if it werent for Kearns, we probably wouldn't have intermittenent wipers nowadays. Probably not the best example, because you could make a strong case that, with intermittent wipers being such a simple invention, probably someone else than Robert Kearns would have thought about it between 1969 and today. It's a balance, of course... However, under today's excessive intellectual property laws, even assuming that Kearns could have successfully protected his idea (because it's not like IP usually favors the small players...), would society really have benefited by limiting the use of this idea (or having everyone pay royalties to Kearns)? Wouldn't plenty of other people, in particular motor companies, come up with the idea "for free" in the 20 years of a patent term anyway? Also, relevant to the original discussion is the fact that the general lack of IP protection for ideas is an important component of free scientific discourse. So science is another situation where the lack of IP laws is arguably a good thing. In this light, when you ask: > if companies could just steal ideas from other people instead of investing in R&D, why wouldn't they? I ask in turn: given that countries can use the research produced by other countries instead of funding their own researchers, why do they do it today?
- BurningFrog 10y ago
  > probably someone else than Robert Kearns would have thought about it between 1969 and today. Yeah, most great inventions would have been made within a year anyway. The truly great ones maybe in 5 years. That doesn't mean big rewards for the first inventor are wrong. The incentives from that is why so many push for these inventions. The argument that if it wasn't for unions 100 years ago, we'd all still be working 14 hour days is based on a similar fallacy.
  - PhasmaFelis 10y ago
    I don't understand what you mean with the union thing. The innovation that brought about better employer practices was employees discovering collective action, not employers discovering the benefits of being nice.
    - BurningFrog 10y ago
      What brought on higher wages and other more employee friendly practices was economic growth. As it becomes more profitable to have employees, businesses have to pay more to get them. They pay in money but also in other benefits, like shorter working hours. Now, if unions demand improvements during times of economic growth, and get them, they will of course claim they caused them. You're probably not convinced, but that's enough for now :)
- saltyBuck 10y ago
  > probably someone else than Robert Kearns would have thought about it between 1969 and today. Don't be so sure - delays existed for decades prior, and windshield wipers existed since horse&buggy days - yet nobody realized the importance of combining the two. There is a reason to the saying "everything is obvious in hindsight".
CamperBob2 10y ago
But if it werent for Kearns, we probably wouldn't have intermittenent wipers nowadays What would be your reason for believing this?
- qbrass 10y ago
  Especially since it had already been invented in the UK before Kearns started working on it.
Kalium 10y ago
> It's easy to diregard IP when you don't own any, but if IP didn't exist the big, bad, evil corporations could steal ideas from people with no recourse. In practice, they already can, because enforcement is ruinously expensive for individuals. The big, bad, evil corporations abuse IP to shut down individuals and smaller companies. Or just things they don't like competing with them. Witness Samsung and Apple. > Sure, IP can be abused, but like the majority of laws, was created with good intentions. A lot of things start with good intentions. However, we have to concern ourselves with results rather than intents.
bloatisgood 10y ago
I would argue that if his IP was protected he would sit on a temporary monpoly and only a handful of car manufacturers that directly license the wipers from him directly could build them. Instead every car manufacturer build them benefiting everyone. Developing IP is expensive but protecting it is even more expensive. Imagine a company invents a cancer curing drug but it cost them 10 billion dollars in R&D. They get their patent but then their competitor spends another 10 billion dollars in R&D to make their own cancer cure that doesn't infringe the previous patent. I think we should have a patent system where when a company creates a patent and it sets the price of the patent to the cost of the R&D (plus some profit) and all buyers will own the patent collectively. The cost is evenly divided across all buyers. Initially the first company that buys the patent pays 10 billion dollars covering the R&D costs. If a competitor buys the patent they will only have to pay 5 billion dollars which then are used to reimburse the first buyer so both only have to pay 5 billion dollars. The third pays 3.33 billion dollars which again are redistributed across the previous buyers. And so on.

tashi 10y ago

One moral justification is that the ability to own and profit from intellectual property gives people a powerful incentive to create and share new things. You seem to be making a statement from first principles: ownership of ideas is absurd. Which, of course, it is. But on the same level of abstraction, who can own land or water or sky? No one. But of course, to "own" these things is an abstraction for a contract created by the societies we're born into, about what you're permitted to do and what happens to people who break the contract. And in that sense, the argument needs to be about what costs and benefits to society, collectively and individually, come with that contract.

nerdponx 10y ago
I would tack onto this argument that, in the case of scientific research, the assignment of research intellectual property to journal publishers is a backwards and inappropriate use of intellectual property anyway.
- a3_nm 10y ago
  Exactly. Research articles are produced with public money, and scientists do not profit financially from their sale, in fact both scientists and the public want scientific articles to be as widely circulated as possible. It then seems completely backwards to use intellectual property to limit "unauthorized" redistribution of articles, in the hope that this would help the "authorized" publisher to circulate the articles...
  - TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
    It's worse than that. The sole contribution of the "publishers" is to make content hard to access - both practically, because you need a university library or a private login, and financially, because either your library has to pay a lot of money, or you do. ($45 for a three page PDF? Please...) While some people try to conflate this with other kinds of IP, this is a completely different process, because research already funded by public money is being kept from the public. Which means anyone who may be interested in research outside of academia - including startups, corporations, and private entrepreneurs - has to pay through the nose for official access. And that simply removes money from the ecosystem and puts it in the pocket of the publishers. It doesn't fund new research, it doesn't increase publishing standards, it doesn't keep food on the table for struggling researchers. It costs a fortune, but adds no social or scientific value at all.

eggy 10y ago

Does this apply to artwork? I ask because a lot of people were upset when Zara, the retail clothing manufacturer, apparently 'pirated' an indie artist's artworks as seen on little appliques on their apparel. It was most likely one of their thousands of graphic designers making squat who found it on the internet, their design manager didn't catch it as a copy of something, and it wound up on their clothing. A fury storm on Twitter with very strong suggestions to take against Zara was being proposed by many. I am sure there were some 'IP is a racket' people among them, but the argument seemed to be a one-way street: IP is free, except if you're a company who profits from it and we don't get our cut.

mtgx 10y ago
No. The fashion industry doesn't have copyrights or patents, only trademarks (the brands). This was a great TED talk about it, and about why IP laws in general are bad and how they limit creativity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLUzgWAEGjY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLUzgWAEGjY You may also be interested in the Everything Is A Remix video series, if you haven't seen it already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9ryPC8bxqE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9ryPC8bxqE

PhasmaFelis 10y ago

I don't think that's right. IP laws are currently under the control of some corrupt and greedy people, but there are clear social benefits to having some sort of IP law.

tzs 10y ago

> The obvious counter-argument being that there's absolutely no moral or philosophical justification for the ownership of information. Could you elaborate a bit, because on the face of it that seems to be kind of a ridiculous statement. There is extensive literature on the philosophical justifications for almost all parts of the law, including intellectual property. For IP, there are two or three major philosophical justifications. In Erupoe, an approach based on Hegel's theories of personality is common. In the US, Locke's theories of ownership of one's labor is often used as a justification. Did you mean to say that you do not think that these philosophical justifications are sufficient, rather than that they do not exist?

shandor 10y ago

>there's absolutely no moral or philosophical justification for the ownership of information Are you sure that the whole thing is really that simple? If information cannot be owned in any way, in any case, then don't the Udemy-using pirates from the othe HN story[1] have all the right in the world to do what they are doing? And surely it also means that for example all so called pirate version "China copies" of brands like Nike etc are also completely fine? And it goes deeper than the megacorps. If no one "owns" any information, then no one can dictate how any single piece of it is used. So you don't get to say that NSA/Facebook/some random hacker has "no right" to hack into your emails and sell them to highest bidder. Or if you think you can, please lay out the logic chain leading to that, I wasn't able to come up with one quickly. Finally, blanket statements lile this don't help anyone. I mean...your bank account and its contents are "info" nowadays, bits on some computers somewhere. Bits just like any other piece of digital information in today's world. I think we can safely say that is some information that is only fair to be owned by some, preferably the individual who earned that money. [1]https://www.troyhunt.com/the-piracy-paradox-at-udemy/ https://www.troyhunt.com/the-piracy-paradox-at-udemy/