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No Copyright Law: The Real Reason for Germany’s Industrial Expansion? (2010)

429 points by gballan 8y ago

skookumchuck 8y ago
Curiously, we see a similar situation today with open source software. The free nature of it would seem to stifle creation of top quality open source software, but the reverse seems to be true. The open source business is thriving.
- throwawayjava 8y ago
  > Curiously, we see a similar situation today with open source software I strongly disagree. Here are four notable counter-examples: 1. Desktop Linux. I'm a religious Linux desktop user, but MacOS is definitely a better operating system. 2. Office suites. Libreoffice/OpenOffice/whatever-we're-supposed-to-call-it-these-days is stuck in the 1990s. 3. Videogames. 4. Large web services (Google Search, GMail, Facebook). Notice that four these examples, where closed-source software outshines OSS in quality, cover 90+% of most people's computer time... Open source software seems to do especially well mostly when the end-user of the software product is a programmer/software engineer/IT type.
  - kanox 8y ago
    Open source does well when companies build commercial products on top of it and then pay the developers.
  - taeric 8y ago
    Having been using Mac os for a while at work, I can't say it is superior. More supported, but equally as broken as my expectations for any os. Office suites just don't build for Linux. Mainly because the people buying are not there, I would wager. For personal, I still loathe most. Games, it's true. But the same situation. Luckily, I don't do 3d shooters anymore. Steam mostly works. Otherwise, most of my game time is on the PS4.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - confounded 8y ago
    > Open source software seems to do especially well mostly when the end-user of the software product is a programmer/software engineer/IT type. Yes. The article and the parent regard industrial benefits. Most of the propriety alternatives that you mention derive a great deal of their value from networked capabilities, made possible due to the proliferation of GNU+Linux on servers. In this way, the availability of GNU+Linux without traditional copyright restrictions has been a huge boon to the commercial software industry, just as the availablity of printed knowledge without traditional copyright restrictions was a huge boon to various German industries.
  - mrob 8y ago
    How is LibreOffice being stuck in the 1990s a problem? MS Office was essentially feature-complete by Office 95, and LibreOffice does everything Office 95 does. It seems all the major changes since then (Clippy, Adaptive Menus, Ribbon Menus) have no value to experienced users.
    - tyfon 8y ago
      I second this, Office has become less and less usable over the years. They keep hiding features and menu items that I use and constantly move around what is not hidden. Libreoffice is a breath of fresh air for me to use. The only thing they have improved in the newer office is the intruduction of 64 bit excel so I can do large (100x100+) matrix operations without external plugins.
      - slavik81 8y ago
        Most of LibreOffice is pretty good, but Impress is awful. Last month I put together a presentation. I wanted three slides with a few bullet points and a handful of images, but I gave up on Impress after encountering multiple different show-stopping bugs. The only good thing I can say about Impress is that every time it crashed, it successfully restored my editing state when I started it up again. I don't think anyone cares about that beast enough to maintain it properly. It should just be scrapped and its resources directed towards Calc and Writer
    - veddox 8y ago
      LibreOffice is a pain if you want to do anything that looks remotely attractive. MS Office, unfortunately, wins hands down at that (and at general usability and power). Being unable to use MS Office was one of my big regrets of working on Linux for a long time. When I finally learnt LaTeX, that at least removed the need for Word ;-) (Although I still miss PowerPoint, LO Impress really doesn't impress me very much at all.)
      - frostburg 8y ago
        How do you feel about the Beamer class for LaTeX? I suspect it's better than Impress (I strive to not actually prepare slideshows in life, but I don't always manage to).
  - TACIXAT 8y ago
    What did Mac OS build off of? Would that be possible without OSS? Same for the large web services. How far would any of those companies have gotten without open source? No one is arguing that unfunded projects will kick the ass of funded ones. However, innovation that can be shared will produce more innovation.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      >Would that be possible without OSS? In the case of Mac OS, probably. UNIX licenses are available and it's not like Apple has exactly turned Darwin into a vibrant open source community. As far as large web and cloud services more broadly? It would certainly be a much different world.
      - oautholaf 8y ago
        Mac OS came from Mach, an open source microkernel from CMU in the 80s. Although Objective-C was originally proprietary, NeXT implemented it on GCC and open sourced it. The origin of modern MacOS/iOS is definitely open source.
        ghaff 8y ago
        Absolutely. My point was that, absent open source alternatives, Mac OS [EDIT: OS X specifically] could have been created on top of a proprietary UNIX. The lack of open source Unix alternatives would likely not have had much of an impact on Mac OS and certainly Apple hasn't taken advantage of the open source development model for Mac OS.
        SeanLuke 8y ago
        > Mac OS came from Mach I believe you mean OS X, not MacOS. Apple could switch OS X to entirely proprietary underpinnings and few customers would even notice. In fact, OpenStep ran just fine on top of NT. [And also on top of then-non-open Solaris]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep
        8y ago
  - veddox 8y ago
    I agree with you there. I love open-source, I barely use anything else. And yet I have to admit that much of it is absolutely not user-friendly in the sense of "I can explain this to my grandmother in under 10 minutes". Much of it is technically amazing, and absolutely fantastic for technical users, but not really suited for the general consumer market. (With some notable exceptions, of course - see Firefox.)
  - Lio 8y ago
    99+% of people’s time? I think you missed out web browsers. The majority of which are open source. Not sure this also counts but almost 100% (leave a side asm.js/webasm for now) of the code run by browsers (JavaScript) also comes eith access to source.
    - fyi1183 8y ago
      The JavaScript that arrives at the browser is usually not source code in the way that licenses tend to define the term (which is the preferred form for modifying the program). It's usually at least minified. It's kind of an interesting situation since it looks like source code even though it really isn't.
    - adrianN 8y ago
      Looking at the source code of nonfree Javascript is not recommended. You could be sued if you happen to write something similar and can't claim anymore that you invented it independently ("white-room").
    - IshKebab 8y ago
      That's not really true - most JavaScript is minified and a lot is obfuscated. And a lot is transpiled from another language. I'd say very few major sites send you readable hand written JavaScript.
- veddox 8y ago
  > The open source business is thriving. Thriving, may be, but not exactly dominating the consumer market. The vast majority of software companies still keep their code well under wraps.
  - zeth___ 8y ago
    The majority of servers are open source, the majority of consumer devices are open source, all super computers are open source. How is open source not eating the world?
    - veddox 8y ago
      As long as MS Windows still has 89% market share on the desktop/laptop market [1], as long as Google still keeps core parts of Android under lock and key, and as long as all my friends still communicate with Facebook and WhatsApp, I think the claim that "the majority of consumer devices are open source" is a bit early. Look, guys, I'm not saying open-source isn't important! And I'm definitely not saying there aren't any great open-source programs out there! All I'm saying is: on the current market, most companies that produce software choose to distribute this software under a closed-source license. What's so hard to accept about this simple observation?! [1] https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share
      - nine_k 8y ago
        Open source makes sense for widely used, preferably infrastructural things. Operating systems, various network servers, programming languages. Most companies' has a very limited audience and a very narrow purpose; it can't benefit from the network effect.
    - adventured 8y ago
      You just named 0.1% of the revenue of the tech industry. Closed: Google search. Windows. Office. Facebook. Cisco. Intel. Amazon AWS. Amazon retail. Most Adobe products. Most Oracle products. iOS and most of what Apple does. Salesforce. Workday. Most of what nVidia does. Most of what Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and pretty much every other chip maker does. Most of what Samsung does. The core software of: PayPal, Square, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, et al. The list keeps going. Most of what every major tech company does is closed off. The tools are largely open source. The actual pieces of the companies that generate revenue are not. They love open source, when it isn't about their revenue generation. Ask Facebook to show us all of their source code. Nearly the entire tech industry is built on massive, closed products. Google search by itself generates more operating income every year than every public open source company combined, by a factor of ten. Ask Google to show you all the source code to search.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  I think a more pertinent example is the Shanzhai culture in Chinese manufacturing, which is distinct from both the overtly open culture of Free software and the explicitly closed structure of intellectual property. You're unlikely to find a datasheet for the latest MediaTek chipset through Google or Baidu, but you won't get sued for sharing a copy with a friend. You can't buy sample quantities through a distributor and MediaTek won't talk to you unless you're a serious player, but it's not hard to buy a couple of chips or a few reels if you know the right person. Information isn't free, but it doesn't have a price tag either - it's exchanged as part of a reciprocal guanxi network. Much like the BBS warez scene, information gradually percolates from a core of well-connected peers to a wider network, creating a hierarchy of esteem and a duty of reciprocity that incentivises the continued flow of information. I share with you today, in the expectation that you will share with me tomorrow.
  - forapurpose 8y ago
    In my limited understanding, guanxi has the taste of corruption, not openness. People doing favors for those they know rather than a free, open, arms-length market which provides more liquidity and opportunity. Is that wrong?
    - barrkel 8y ago
      People doing favors for those they know rather than a free, open, arms-length market This describes most markets that are not in fungible commodities.
    - forkLding 8y ago
      Guanxi is a broad term and can mean anything from networking (the business kind) to asking about job referrals from friends, you can google the investopedia definition to get a better idea. It can be seen negatively or positively based on the context as in like "he got his job through guanxi" aka he either networked hard (positive) or there was some kind of nespotism involved (negative).
      - citrablue 8y ago
- luckydata 8y ago
  Maybe the community, the "business" is doing quite poorly.
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago
  Not really similar. Copyright applies by default and releasing software is voluntary.
maxxxxx 8y ago
I remember reading that the strength of manufacturing in China is also that everything gets copied and innovation spreads quickly.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  Process innovation and best practices is not generally something that gets IP protection. AS for the article: The richest countries have strong IP protections, generally, that might indicate something. Certainly creative trademarks, brands etc. - I don't like Disney but I think they have the right to protect Mickey Mouse so long as they are a viable entity/business. Drugs ... this is one place where innovation might come to a halt of things could not be protected. I'm aware Unis do a lot of key research, but bringing something to market is hugely expensive. Also remember a lot of patents are defensive in nature - their only purposes is to prevent trolls. So that's a sad artifact of it all. No doubt the system needs an overhaul.
  - sachdevap 8y ago
    "The richest countries have strong IP protections, generally, that might indicate something." The assumption here seems to be that their riches come from IP protections. It could be argued that the IP protections are a result of lobbying from rich companies. I am not arguing that the causation is wrong, but the implied claim does not follow from the observation.
    - gridaphobe 8y ago
      Or it could be the causation is correct, but for a rather unsavory reason, the wealth came from economic rents due to IP protections. The argument that IP defenders need to make is that these innovations could not have happened without strong IP protections, and I’ve never seen a compelling argument for this.
  - ekianjo 8y ago
    >AS for the article: The richest countries have strong IP protections, generally, that might indicate something. you have something in the line that correlation is not causation?
cocacola1 8y ago
Isn't it the same case for the United States in the 19th century? There were copyright laws protecting the states, but these didn't extend internationally, so books and other material could be brought stateside and be disseminated or published without punishment.
- M2Ys4U 8y ago
  It's also the reason for Hollywood - Film companies set up in LA to make it harder to enforce patents against them.
- digi_owl 8y ago
  Hell, USA didn't sign the international copyright convention until 1980!
- tzs 8y ago
  International works were not protected by copyright in the US, but it didn't really matter because of how long it took for copiers to get their copies on the market. The vast majority of books made most of their sales shortly after publication. By the time the copier could get a copy of the published book, typeset their edition, and go into production almost everyone who wanted the book had bought a copy from the original publisher. Stephen Breyer, back when he was a law professor at Harvard rather than a Supreme Court Justice, wrote an article in the Harvard Law Review called "The Uneasy Case for Copyright" exploring the idea that because of the limitations of copying technology much of earlier copyright law really didn't do much. It's an interesting argument, but technological advances in copying have made it largely inapplicable for the present day.
  - bhaak 8y ago
    Charles Dickens did disagree with this view: https://creativelawcenter.com/dickens-american-copyright/ https://creativelawcenter.com/dickens-american-copyright/ But there are of course two sides to this story. Pirated editions back then as today increase the popularity of the artists, often more than their agency could do. Unsurprisingly, even in the 19th century they came to a similar solution like our current music industry (minus the unsuccessful DRM part). You can't pirate live performances: "When he returned in 1867, he had mastered a way to generate alternative income streams based on his celebrity status. He performed readings of his work to packed houses and collected the receipts from the door."
erikb 8y ago
What means no copyright law? Of course we have laws about it.
- manveru 8y ago
  > Did Germany experience rapid industrial expansion in the 19th century due to an absence of copyright law? That's the very first sentence...
  - erikb 8y ago
    Ah and 2010 is in the 19th century? I guess I was never good in math.
    - diffeomorphism 8y ago
      That is the standard way to write that the article was published in 2010.
pimmen 8y ago
The debate around copyright today is just so weird I think; "I should be able to prevent anyone from producing anything too similar throughout my entire life, and my heirs should be able to stop them for another lifetime after I'm gone." "Why?" "Because the money they make is money I could've made." "So, make another work that you can monetize?" "But why would I work if I have to work?" I can understand copyright to a degree, but the lengths we've agreed to in the West is absolutely ridiculous and ripe for abuse by companies that are built on aggregating IP.
- amelius 8y ago
  > and ripe for abuse by companies that are built on aggregating IP Guess who pushed the copyright laws to where they are now ...
- friedman23 8y ago
  >"So, make another work that you can monetize?" How are they going to monetize it if the printing presses will just print the work for free?
  - pimmen 8y ago
    That’s what I mean by ”to a degree”. If you get a few years of time with copyright and time to monetize it tgat’s not too stifling for creativity. If you however get two lifetimes that’s just silly.
- mickronome 8y ago
  Agreed, and I also think this investment/lottery/entitlement mindset is toxic because it devalues the actual work. Human progress, our progress, comes from the work being done, not the money that can be made from it. While money also end up funding other work, it's blindingly clear through the distribution of money and the proliferation of various speculation markets, that actually doing work to earn money is almost seen as 'earning' it in a roundabout way. All you really need to do if you have real money, is to do nothing at all. Because while you can earn even more by doing something, even absolutely safe positions will get you a higher lifetime income increase than the average worker can expect over their lifetime. It's simple math that shows how extremely we've devalued work, and I believe it has a negative effect on lots of things, some that might even too obvious to be visible at all.
littlestymaar 8y ago
I had no idea about the situation in Germany, but it's a well-known fact that the current power of the Swiss chemical and pharmaceutical industry comes from the lack of patents law in Switzerland during the late 19th century[1]: a few French chemists moved to Switzerland to circumvent the French patents. A well-known example is Alexander Clavel who, in 1859, founded Ciba AG, a silk-dyeing business using a French patent with no license. Ciba later became Ciba-Geigy, which later became Novartis. One of the biggest pharma corp in the world today. Source: Swiss National Museum, Zurich. [1] : Patents were only introduced in the Swiss law in 1907.
- dogma1138 8y ago
  >Patents were only introduced in the Swiss law in 1907. Luckily for us all otherwise we might never had a certain patent clerk figuring out relativity. Edit: Also the Swiss Patent Office was founded in 1888 which is more inline with what I remember as Einstein worked there since 1902. Do you know under which mandate did it operate then? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Federal_Institute_of_Intellectual_Property https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Federal_Institute_of_I...
  - amelius 8y ago
    > Luckily for us all otherwise we might never had a certain patent clerk figuring out relativity. Also glad he didn't patent it.
    - kwhitefoot 8y ago
      Only designs for machines and methods embodied in machines were generally patentable in the past. Mathematical formulae are not patentable.
  - yorwba 8y ago
    The then Federal Industrial Property Agency officially came into existence on 15 November 1888. This was as a result of the Patents Act of 29 June 1888 and the Industrial Designs and Models Act of 21 December 1888. These two new laws required a new federal office to assume the associated tasks. https://www.ige.ch/en/about-us/the-history-of-the-ipi.html https://www.ige.ch/en/about-us/the-history-of-the-ipi.html Maybe what changed in 1907 was that French patents were protected as well?
branchless 8y ago
Rentier activity, as usual, inhibits growth.
veddox 8y ago
Interesting point about publishers producing a cheap and a "classy" version of their books already way back then. I seem to remember reading somewhere else that when paperbacks first came up, they were a huge success, yet were criticized by the more snobbish educated elite as a virtual blasphemy...
- digi_owl 8y ago
  Tolkien at least had that attitude towards LOTR being printed in paperback in USA in the 60s (never mind that the publisher did so on questionable legal grounds).
  - jillesvangurp 8y ago
    I have a paperback version of LOTR in a single volume. Very convenient. Has the full text in relatively small font in just under 1200 pages.
  - walshemj 8y ago
    This was to compete with the pirated editions - its mentioned in the forward of my UK edition.
mnm1 8y ago
> Authors are only motivated to write, runs the conventional belief, if they know their rights will be protected. This is absurd. How stupid does one have to be to think this? Copyright serves only one purpose: to make profits for the author and, more importantly, to make profits for the publisher and distributor by exploiting the author's work. These days it almost exclusively does the latter. Copyright is not about contributing to or advancing society. It has nothing to do with that regardless of the original intentions behind it. Copyright is about making money for a few individuals or groups at the expense of the wider society. The sooner the idiotic conventional thinking quoted above is replaced by a proper analysis, the closer we are to fixing this atrocious system that's holding us back.
- my_first_acct 8y ago
  "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." --Samuel Johnson http://www.samueljohnson.com/writing.html http://www.samueljohnson.com/writing.html
  - mnm1 8y ago
    Lol. Did someone pay you to write this comment? No? Well then I don't need to tell you who the blockhead is. Welcome to the club. We've been called much worse. This quote is even more absurd than that section of the article. Tell that to Stephen King or any other prolific author, whether professional, amateur, or just a weekend HN commenter. Just because someone slightly famous says something that is later quoted doesn't make it true.
lnrdgmz 8y ago
> The German proliferation of knowledge created a curious situation that hardly anyone is likely to have noticed at the time. Sigismund Hermbstädt, for example, a chemistry and pharmacy professor in Berlin, who has long since disappeared into the oblivion of history, earned more royalties for his "Principles of Leather Tanning" published in 1806 than British author Mary Shelley did for her horror novel "Frankenstein," which is still famous today. In the absence of copyrights, and with plagiarism being rampant (as the article claims) how could authors command favorable royalty agreements? Could a rival publisher not just print the same book, sans royalty agreement, and undercut the original publisher?
- incompatible 8y ago
  The printers would have been able to sell fresh material, and perhaps the payments to the authors were insignificant if the volume was high enough. Competitors would also have had to replicate the work of typesetting and printing, which would take a while.
trhway 8y ago
Case in point - US aviation being backwater until Rights patent expired while the rest of the world saw explosive innovation in aviation. Patents were necessary only when public disclosure had value. In the world where the same things get developed almost simultaneously by different people at different places and anything can be quickly reverse engineered the public gets no value in return for granting monopoly through a patent.
philipps 8y ago
Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang’s book “Kicking Away the Ladder” describes how loose IP regulation has been at the center of the economic development of many countries. Sadly, once countries have developed to a certain level they tend to implement stronger IP to protect their position against other countries. http://www.paecon.net/PAEtexts/Chang1.htm http://www.paecon.net/PAEtexts/Chang1.htm
vackosar 8y ago
To me copyright has a lot of similarity to GDPR. I posted about that now actually: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17330914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17330914
- Maarten88 8y ago
  In an abstract sense, you may be right. In practice, authors sign away the ownership to a publisher in a profit sharing deal and it ends up protecting the publishers profit. Makes me wonder of there is a business model for protecting user data, by managing any user-business data relation/permission and hunting down any company who is inappropriately using data from any member and collecting the fines. That would be the first protection racket that I'd like...
neilwilson 8y ago
There is no justification for copyrights and patents any more than there is for any other monopoly. However if we get rid of them there is a need to socialise creative production so that artists of all shapes and hues in all creative fields can still afford to live simply doing what they love to do. It's a fair trade. Producers can copy and extend whatever any human has created but in return they have to produce enough to look after them.
- colechristensen 8y ago
  >Producers can copy and extend whatever any human has created but in return they have to produce enough to look after them. Which is just a royalty with extra steps. The problem with most attempts to subvert a capitalist/market economy is that they all only manage to obfuscate the usage of money and ownership and replace a lot of it with centralized control. Your idea still requires ownership of IP and compensation for it.
b0rsuk 8y ago
Suppose we even abolished all patents. Would it even make a difference in the software world? The selfish already got their new tool - online services. Not only you never have to release any source code, the user doesn't even run the compiled version himself. All he gets is output. The code running his computations may or may not be patented, he'll never know. I don't think licences like Aferro GPL can realistically be enforced.
- jokoon 8y ago
  I think patents are relevant when you do chemistry or biology research. If you burn money for years designing a molecule, you could say you "own" the molecule, so you patent it. The problem with the patent system is that it's necessary in a world where you need money to do any simple thing, because states cannot fund every research project, since it's impossible to know the outcome of every research. But obviously you cannot patent everything, and that's where the patent system is failing. There is no good legal definition of a worthwhile invention. Software is not patent-able because it never really is an invention that requires to burn a lot of money, unlike other domains of research. Anybody can write any kind of software. But patents are still relevant where research requires expensive resources.
  - dmos62 8y ago
    The original idea with patents was that they should make it worthwhile to invest in innovation and otherwise expire as fast as possible so that eventually all profit. Our current patent system has forgotten that second part and morphed to "expire as late as possible", which only serves greed.
pimmen 8y ago
If there’s one argument against copyright I would bring up it’s patent trolls. If you can propose an IP law to me that makes sure creative individuals are not bullied and stifled by unscrupulous people hungry for a quick buck I would be more inclined to support copyright laws.
vinceguidry 8y ago
What I really liked about it is how it forces publishing companies to truly make knowledge available for everyone. It's the direction music is going in this country, where individual listens are essentially a free public resource for anyone who pays a minuscule subscription fee. Books and movies seem to be retaining pricing power for some reason. I feel like the ultimate reason behind this is that books and movies take a lot more time and attention to consume. I know for me, I would be far more inclined to read and watch more of them if it were easier to break them up into chunks. Give me a specialized movie player that lets me pause and start movies by scene, make individual books and movies super cheap, sure, I don't mind paying cable-like fees for something actually useful and I'd watch movies a scene at a time by the dozen. Give me a feed reader that mixes in book chapters, in order, with my normal news feed. Essentially, I don't want to waste time on crappy platforms. Just give me the damn content in a way that makes sense for me to use it. I may get to the point where my appetite for information is so voracious, I'll just mass pirate stuff and upload it all into a personal database so I can chunk it myself.
- BlackMonday 8y ago
  > What I really liked about it is how it forces publishing companies to truly make knowledge available for everyone. I haven't read the article yet, but wow will that interact with: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/eus-copyright-proposal-extremely-bad-news-everyone-even-especially-wikipedia https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/eus-copyright-proposal... [0] [0] https://act1.openmedia.org/savethelink https://act1.openmedia.org/savethelink
walshemj 8y ago
And the unification, industrial revolutions, Bismark and all those wars had nothing to do with it - seems a very narrow view of 19th century German history
- veddox 8y ago
  I see the article more as pointing out one aspect that is often ignored - not as invalidating all those other aspects.
cleansy 8y ago
The historian claims that the missing copyright is "the real reason" for industrial expansion. I think it's "only" a contributing factor. Germany was divided in many smaller states and every state had their own universities. Many of these states were competing with each other about talent. So instead of centralising everything they had a distributed scholary culture. That's probably why there was a culture of "thinkers and readers". EDIT: Hence why a copyright law was not really enforcable. So the root cause was the division and competition, the missing law just a symptom of it IMHO. Plus: lot's of iron and coal easily accessible and many big commercially usable rivers for transportation.
profalseidol 8y ago
Wonder what kinds of software we have now if we didn't have Copyright Law for source code too?
pitchups 8y ago
The fashion industry is another example of an area that has thrived because of a lack of copyrights, as argued is this TED talk : "Copyright law's grip on film, music and software barely touches the fashion industry ... and fashion benefits in both innovation and sales, says Johanna Blakley. In her talk, she talks about what all creative industries can learn from fashion's free culture.." https://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture https://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashi...

429 points by gballan 8y ago

Curiously, we see a similar situation today with open source software. The free nature of it would seem to stifle creation of top quality open source software, but the reverse seems to be true. The open source business is thriving.

throwawayjava 8y ago
> Curiously, we see a similar situation today with open source software I strongly disagree. Here are four notable counter-examples: 1. Desktop Linux. I'm a religious Linux desktop user, but MacOS is definitely a better operating system. 2. Office suites. Libreoffice/OpenOffice/whatever-we're-supposed-to-call-it-these-days is stuck in the 1990s. 3. Videogames. 4. Large web services (Google Search, GMail, Facebook). Notice that four these examples, where closed-source software outshines OSS in quality, cover 90+% of most people's computer time... Open source software seems to do especially well mostly when the end-user of the software product is a programmer/software engineer/IT type.
- kanox 8y ago
  Open source does well when companies build commercial products on top of it and then pay the developers.
- taeric 8y ago
  Having been using Mac os for a while at work, I can't say it is superior. More supported, but equally as broken as my expectations for any os. Office suites just don't build for Linux. Mainly because the people buying are not there, I would wager. For personal, I still loathe most. Games, it's true. But the same situation. Luckily, I don't do 3d shooters anymore. Steam mostly works. Otherwise, most of my game time is on the PS4.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- confounded 8y ago
  > Open source software seems to do especially well mostly when the end-user of the software product is a programmer/software engineer/IT type. Yes. The article and the parent regard industrial benefits. Most of the propriety alternatives that you mention derive a great deal of their value from networked capabilities, made possible due to the proliferation of GNU+Linux on servers. In this way, the availability of GNU+Linux without traditional copyright restrictions has been a huge boon to the commercial software industry, just as the availablity of printed knowledge without traditional copyright restrictions was a huge boon to various German industries.
- mrob 8y ago
  How is LibreOffice being stuck in the 1990s a problem? MS Office was essentially feature-complete by Office 95, and LibreOffice does everything Office 95 does. It seems all the major changes since then (Clippy, Adaptive Menus, Ribbon Menus) have no value to experienced users.
  - tyfon 8y ago
    I second this, Office has become less and less usable over the years. They keep hiding features and menu items that I use and constantly move around what is not hidden. Libreoffice is a breath of fresh air for me to use. The only thing they have improved in the newer office is the intruduction of 64 bit excel so I can do large (100x100+) matrix operations without external plugins.
    - slavik81 8y ago
      Most of LibreOffice is pretty good, but Impress is awful. Last month I put together a presentation. I wanted three slides with a few bullet points and a handful of images, but I gave up on Impress after encountering multiple different show-stopping bugs. The only good thing I can say about Impress is that every time it crashed, it successfully restored my editing state when I started it up again. I don't think anyone cares about that beast enough to maintain it properly. It should just be scrapped and its resources directed towards Calc and Writer
  - veddox 8y ago
    LibreOffice is a pain if you want to do anything that looks remotely attractive. MS Office, unfortunately, wins hands down at that (and at general usability and power). Being unable to use MS Office was one of my big regrets of working on Linux for a long time. When I finally learnt LaTeX, that at least removed the need for Word ;-) (Although I still miss PowerPoint, LO Impress really doesn't impress me very much at all.)
    - frostburg 8y ago
      How do you feel about the Beamer class for LaTeX? I suspect it's better than Impress (I strive to not actually prepare slideshows in life, but I don't always manage to).
- TACIXAT 8y ago
  What did Mac OS build off of? Would that be possible without OSS? Same for the large web services. How far would any of those companies have gotten without open source? No one is arguing that unfunded projects will kick the ass of funded ones. However, innovation that can be shared will produce more innovation.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    >Would that be possible without OSS? In the case of Mac OS, probably. UNIX licenses are available and it's not like Apple has exactly turned Darwin into a vibrant open source community. As far as large web and cloud services more broadly? It would certainly be a much different world.
    - oautholaf 8y ago
      Mac OS came from Mach, an open source microkernel from CMU in the 80s. Although Objective-C was originally proprietary, NeXT implemented it on GCC and open sourced it. The origin of modern MacOS/iOS is definitely open source.
      - ghaff 8y ago
        Absolutely. My point was that, absent open source alternatives, Mac OS [EDIT: OS X specifically] could have been created on top of a proprietary UNIX. The lack of open source Unix alternatives would likely not have had much of an impact on Mac OS and certainly Apple hasn't taken advantage of the open source development model for Mac OS.
      - SeanLuke 8y ago
        > Mac OS came from Mach I believe you mean OS X, not MacOS. Apple could switch OS X to entirely proprietary underpinnings and few customers would even notice. In fact, OpenStep ran just fine on top of NT. [And also on top of then-non-open Solaris]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep
        8y ago
- veddox 8y ago
  I agree with you there. I love open-source, I barely use anything else. And yet I have to admit that much of it is absolutely not user-friendly in the sense of "I can explain this to my grandmother in under 10 minutes". Much of it is technically amazing, and absolutely fantastic for technical users, but not really suited for the general consumer market. (With some notable exceptions, of course - see Firefox.)
- Lio 8y ago
  99+% of people’s time? I think you missed out web browsers. The majority of which are open source. Not sure this also counts but almost 100% (leave a side asm.js/webasm for now) of the code run by browsers (JavaScript) also comes eith access to source.
  - fyi1183 8y ago
    The JavaScript that arrives at the browser is usually not source code in the way that licenses tend to define the term (which is the preferred form for modifying the program). It's usually at least minified. It's kind of an interesting situation since it looks like source code even though it really isn't.
  - adrianN 8y ago
    Looking at the source code of nonfree Javascript is not recommended. You could be sued if you happen to write something similar and can't claim anymore that you invented it independently ("white-room").
  - IshKebab 8y ago
    That's not really true - most JavaScript is minified and a lot is obfuscated. And a lot is transpiled from another language. I'd say very few major sites send you readable hand written JavaScript.
veddox 8y ago
> The open source business is thriving. Thriving, may be, but not exactly dominating the consumer market. The vast majority of software companies still keep their code well under wraps.
- zeth___ 8y ago
  The majority of servers are open source, the majority of consumer devices are open source, all super computers are open source. How is open source not eating the world?
  - veddox 8y ago
    As long as MS Windows still has 89% market share on the desktop/laptop market [1], as long as Google still keeps core parts of Android under lock and key, and as long as all my friends still communicate with Facebook and WhatsApp, I think the claim that "the majority of consumer devices are open source" is a bit early. Look, guys, I'm not saying open-source isn't important! And I'm definitely not saying there aren't any great open-source programs out there! All I'm saying is: on the current market, most companies that produce software choose to distribute this software under a closed-source license. What's so hard to accept about this simple observation?! [1] https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share
    - nine_k 8y ago
      Open source makes sense for widely used, preferably infrastructural things. Operating systems, various network servers, programming languages. Most companies' has a very limited audience and a very narrow purpose; it can't benefit from the network effect.
  - adventured 8y ago
    You just named 0.1% of the revenue of the tech industry. Closed: Google search. Windows. Office. Facebook. Cisco. Intel. Amazon AWS. Amazon retail. Most Adobe products. Most Oracle products. iOS and most of what Apple does. Salesforce. Workday. Most of what nVidia does. Most of what Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and pretty much every other chip maker does. Most of what Samsung does. The core software of: PayPal, Square, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, et al. The list keeps going. Most of what every major tech company does is closed off. The tools are largely open source. The actual pieces of the companies that generate revenue are not. They love open source, when it isn't about their revenue generation. Ask Facebook to show us all of their source code. Nearly the entire tech industry is built on massive, closed products. Google search by itself generates more operating income every year than every public open source company combined, by a factor of ten. Ask Google to show you all the source code to search.
jdietrich 8y ago
I think a more pertinent example is the Shanzhai culture in Chinese manufacturing, which is distinct from both the overtly open culture of Free software and the explicitly closed structure of intellectual property. You're unlikely to find a datasheet for the latest MediaTek chipset through Google or Baidu, but you won't get sued for sharing a copy with a friend. You can't buy sample quantities through a distributor and MediaTek won't talk to you unless you're a serious player, but it's not hard to buy a couple of chips or a few reels if you know the right person. Information isn't free, but it doesn't have a price tag either - it's exchanged as part of a reciprocal guanxi network. Much like the BBS warez scene, information gradually percolates from a core of well-connected peers to a wider network, creating a hierarchy of esteem and a duty of reciprocity that incentivises the continued flow of information. I share with you today, in the expectation that you will share with me tomorrow.
- forapurpose 8y ago
  In my limited understanding, guanxi has the taste of corruption, not openness. People doing favors for those they know rather than a free, open, arms-length market which provides more liquidity and opportunity. Is that wrong?
  - barrkel 8y ago
    People doing favors for those they know rather than a free, open, arms-length market This describes most markets that are not in fungible commodities.
  - forkLding 8y ago
    Guanxi is a broad term and can mean anything from networking (the business kind) to asking about job referrals from friends, you can google the investopedia definition to get a better idea. It can be seen negatively or positively based on the context as in like "he got his job through guanxi" aka he either networked hard (positive) or there was some kind of nespotism involved (negative).
    - citrablue 8y ago
luckydata 8y ago
Maybe the community, the "business" is doing quite poorly.
eeZah7Ux 8y ago
Not really similar. Copyright applies by default and releasing software is voluntary.

maxxxxx 8y ago

I remember reading that the strength of manufacturing in China is also that everything gets copied and innovation spreads quickly.

sonnyblarney 8y ago
Process innovation and best practices is not generally something that gets IP protection. AS for the article: The richest countries have strong IP protections, generally, that might indicate something. Certainly creative trademarks, brands etc. - I don't like Disney but I think they have the right to protect Mickey Mouse so long as they are a viable entity/business. Drugs ... this is one place where innovation might come to a halt of things could not be protected. I'm aware Unis do a lot of key research, but bringing something to market is hugely expensive. Also remember a lot of patents are defensive in nature - their only purposes is to prevent trolls. So that's a sad artifact of it all. No doubt the system needs an overhaul.
- sachdevap 8y ago
  "The richest countries have strong IP protections, generally, that might indicate something." The assumption here seems to be that their riches come from IP protections. It could be argued that the IP protections are a result of lobbying from rich companies. I am not arguing that the causation is wrong, but the implied claim does not follow from the observation.
  - gridaphobe 8y ago
    Or it could be the causation is correct, but for a rather unsavory reason, the wealth came from economic rents due to IP protections. The argument that IP defenders need to make is that these innovations could not have happened without strong IP protections, and I’ve never seen a compelling argument for this.
- ekianjo 8y ago
  >AS for the article: The richest countries have strong IP protections, generally, that might indicate something. you have something in the line that correlation is not causation?

cocacola1 8y ago

Isn't it the same case for the United States in the 19th century? There were copyright laws protecting the states, but these didn't extend internationally, so books and other material could be brought stateside and be disseminated or published without punishment.

M2Ys4U 8y ago
It's also the reason for Hollywood - Film companies set up in LA to make it harder to enforce patents against them.
digi_owl 8y ago
Hell, USA didn't sign the international copyright convention until 1980!
tzs 8y ago
International works were not protected by copyright in the US, but it didn't really matter because of how long it took for copiers to get their copies on the market. The vast majority of books made most of their sales shortly after publication. By the time the copier could get a copy of the published book, typeset their edition, and go into production almost everyone who wanted the book had bought a copy from the original publisher. Stephen Breyer, back when he was a law professor at Harvard rather than a Supreme Court Justice, wrote an article in the Harvard Law Review called "The Uneasy Case for Copyright" exploring the idea that because of the limitations of copying technology much of earlier copyright law really didn't do much. It's an interesting argument, but technological advances in copying have made it largely inapplicable for the present day.
- bhaak 8y ago
  Charles Dickens did disagree with this view: https://creativelawcenter.com/dickens-american-copyright/ https://creativelawcenter.com/dickens-american-copyright/ But there are of course two sides to this story. Pirated editions back then as today increase the popularity of the artists, often more than their agency could do. Unsurprisingly, even in the 19th century they came to a similar solution like our current music industry (minus the unsuccessful DRM part). You can't pirate live performances: "When he returned in 1867, he had mastered a way to generate alternative income streams based on his celebrity status. He performed readings of his work to packed houses and collected the receipts from the door."

erikb 8y ago

What means no copyright law? Of course we have laws about it.

manveru 8y ago
> Did Germany experience rapid industrial expansion in the 19th century due to an absence of copyright law? That's the very first sentence...
- erikb 8y ago
  Ah and 2010 is in the 19th century? I guess I was never good in math.
  - diffeomorphism 8y ago
    That is the standard way to write that the article was published in 2010.

pimmen 8y ago

The debate around copyright today is just so weird I think; "I should be able to prevent anyone from producing anything too similar throughout my entire life, and my heirs should be able to stop them for another lifetime after I'm gone." "Why?" "Because the money they make is money I could've made." "So, make another work that you can monetize?" "But why would I work if I have to work?" I can understand copyright to a degree, but the lengths we've agreed to in the West is absolutely ridiculous and ripe for abuse by companies that are built on aggregating IP.

amelius 8y ago
> and ripe for abuse by companies that are built on aggregating IP Guess who pushed the copyright laws to where they are now ...
friedman23 8y ago
>"So, make another work that you can monetize?" How are they going to monetize it if the printing presses will just print the work for free?
- pimmen 8y ago
  That’s what I mean by ”to a degree”. If you get a few years of time with copyright and time to monetize it tgat’s not too stifling for creativity. If you however get two lifetimes that’s just silly.
mickronome 8y ago
Agreed, and I also think this investment/lottery/entitlement mindset is toxic because it devalues the actual work. Human progress, our progress, comes from the work being done, not the money that can be made from it. While money also end up funding other work, it's blindingly clear through the distribution of money and the proliferation of various speculation markets, that actually doing work to earn money is almost seen as 'earning' it in a roundabout way. All you really need to do if you have real money, is to do nothing at all. Because while you can earn even more by doing something, even absolutely safe positions will get you a higher lifetime income increase than the average worker can expect over their lifetime. It's simple math that shows how extremely we've devalued work, and I believe it has a negative effect on lots of things, some that might even too obvious to be visible at all.

littlestymaar 8y ago

I had no idea about the situation in Germany, but it's a well-known fact that the current power of the Swiss chemical and pharmaceutical industry comes from the lack of patents law in Switzerland during the late 19th century[1]: a few French chemists moved to Switzerland to circumvent the French patents. A well-known example is Alexander Clavel who, in 1859, founded Ciba AG, a silk-dyeing business using a French patent with no license. Ciba later became Ciba-Geigy, which later became Novartis. One of the biggest pharma corp in the world today. Source: Swiss National Museum, Zurich. [1] : Patents were only introduced in the Swiss law in 1907.

dogma1138 8y ago
>Patents were only introduced in the Swiss law in 1907. Luckily for us all otherwise we might never had a certain patent clerk figuring out relativity. Edit: Also the Swiss Patent Office was founded in 1888 which is more inline with what I remember as Einstein worked there since 1902. Do you know under which mandate did it operate then? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Federal_Institute_of_Intellectual_Property https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Federal_Institute_of_I...
- amelius 8y ago
  > Luckily for us all otherwise we might never had a certain patent clerk figuring out relativity. Also glad he didn't patent it.
  - kwhitefoot 8y ago
    Only designs for machines and methods embodied in machines were generally patentable in the past. Mathematical formulae are not patentable.
- yorwba 8y ago
  The then Federal Industrial Property Agency officially came into existence on 15 November 1888. This was as a result of the Patents Act of 29 June 1888 and the Industrial Designs and Models Act of 21 December 1888. These two new laws required a new federal office to assume the associated tasks. https://www.ige.ch/en/about-us/the-history-of-the-ipi.html https://www.ige.ch/en/about-us/the-history-of-the-ipi.html Maybe what changed in 1907 was that French patents were protected as well?

branchless 8y ago

Rentier activity, as usual, inhibits growth.

veddox 8y ago

Interesting point about publishers producing a cheap and a "classy" version of their books already way back then. I seem to remember reading somewhere else that when paperbacks first came up, they were a huge success, yet were criticized by the more snobbish educated elite as a virtual blasphemy...

digi_owl 8y ago
Tolkien at least had that attitude towards LOTR being printed in paperback in USA in the 60s (never mind that the publisher did so on questionable legal grounds).
- jillesvangurp 8y ago
  I have a paperback version of LOTR in a single volume. Very convenient. Has the full text in relatively small font in just under 1200 pages.
- walshemj 8y ago
  This was to compete with the pirated editions - its mentioned in the forward of my UK edition.

mnm1 8y ago

> Authors are only motivated to write, runs the conventional belief, if they know their rights will be protected. This is absurd. How stupid does one have to be to think this? Copyright serves only one purpose: to make profits for the author and, more importantly, to make profits for the publisher and distributor by exploiting the author's work. These days it almost exclusively does the latter. Copyright is not about contributing to or advancing society. It has nothing to do with that regardless of the original intentions behind it. Copyright is about making money for a few individuals or groups at the expense of the wider society. The sooner the idiotic conventional thinking quoted above is replaced by a proper analysis, the closer we are to fixing this atrocious system that's holding us back.

my_first_acct 8y ago
"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." --Samuel Johnson http://www.samueljohnson.com/writing.html http://www.samueljohnson.com/writing.html
- mnm1 8y ago
  Lol. Did someone pay you to write this comment? No? Well then I don't need to tell you who the blockhead is. Welcome to the club. We've been called much worse. This quote is even more absurd than that section of the article. Tell that to Stephen King or any other prolific author, whether professional, amateur, or just a weekend HN commenter. Just because someone slightly famous says something that is later quoted doesn't make it true.

lnrdgmz 8y ago

> The German proliferation of knowledge created a curious situation that hardly anyone is likely to have noticed at the time. Sigismund Hermbstädt, for example, a chemistry and pharmacy professor in Berlin, who has long since disappeared into the oblivion of history, earned more royalties for his "Principles of Leather Tanning" published in 1806 than British author Mary Shelley did for her horror novel "Frankenstein," which is still famous today. In the absence of copyrights, and with plagiarism being rampant (as the article claims) how could authors command favorable royalty agreements? Could a rival publisher not just print the same book, sans royalty agreement, and undercut the original publisher?

incompatible 8y ago
The printers would have been able to sell fresh material, and perhaps the payments to the authors were insignificant if the volume was high enough. Competitors would also have had to replicate the work of typesetting and printing, which would take a while.

trhway 8y ago

Case in point - US aviation being backwater until Rights patent expired while the rest of the world saw explosive innovation in aviation. Patents were necessary only when public disclosure had value. In the world where the same things get developed almost simultaneously by different people at different places and anything can be quickly reverse engineered the public gets no value in return for granting monopoly through a patent.

philipps 8y ago

Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang’s book “Kicking Away the Ladder” describes how loose IP regulation has been at the center of the economic development of many countries. Sadly, once countries have developed to a certain level they tend to implement stronger IP to protect their position against other countries. http://www.paecon.net/PAEtexts/Chang1.htm http://www.paecon.net/PAEtexts/Chang1.htm

vackosar 8y ago

To me copyright has a lot of similarity to GDPR. I posted about that now actually: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17330914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17330914

Maarten88 8y ago
In an abstract sense, you may be right. In practice, authors sign away the ownership to a publisher in a profit sharing deal and it ends up protecting the publishers profit. Makes me wonder of there is a business model for protecting user data, by managing any user-business data relation/permission and hunting down any company who is inappropriately using data from any member and collecting the fines. That would be the first protection racket that I'd like...

neilwilson 8y ago

There is no justification for copyrights and patents any more than there is for any other monopoly. However if we get rid of them there is a need to socialise creative production so that artists of all shapes and hues in all creative fields can still afford to live simply doing what they love to do. It's a fair trade. Producers can copy and extend whatever any human has created but in return they have to produce enough to look after them.

colechristensen 8y ago
>Producers can copy and extend whatever any human has created but in return they have to produce enough to look after them. Which is just a royalty with extra steps. The problem with most attempts to subvert a capitalist/market economy is that they all only manage to obfuscate the usage of money and ownership and replace a lot of it with centralized control. Your idea still requires ownership of IP and compensation for it.

b0rsuk 8y ago

Suppose we even abolished all patents. Would it even make a difference in the software world? The selfish already got their new tool - online services. Not only you never have to release any source code, the user doesn't even run the compiled version himself. All he gets is output. The code running his computations may or may not be patented, he'll never know. I don't think licences like Aferro GPL can realistically be enforced.

jokoon 8y ago
I think patents are relevant when you do chemistry or biology research. If you burn money for years designing a molecule, you could say you "own" the molecule, so you patent it. The problem with the patent system is that it's necessary in a world where you need money to do any simple thing, because states cannot fund every research project, since it's impossible to know the outcome of every research. But obviously you cannot patent everything, and that's where the patent system is failing. There is no good legal definition of a worthwhile invention. Software is not patent-able because it never really is an invention that requires to burn a lot of money, unlike other domains of research. Anybody can write any kind of software. But patents are still relevant where research requires expensive resources.
- dmos62 8y ago
  The original idea with patents was that they should make it worthwhile to invest in innovation and otherwise expire as fast as possible so that eventually all profit. Our current patent system has forgotten that second part and morphed to "expire as late as possible", which only serves greed.

pimmen 8y ago

If there’s one argument against copyright I would bring up it’s patent trolls. If you can propose an IP law to me that makes sure creative individuals are not bullied and stifled by unscrupulous people hungry for a quick buck I would be more inclined to support copyright laws.

vinceguidry 8y ago

What I really liked about it is how it forces publishing companies to truly make knowledge available for everyone. It's the direction music is going in this country, where individual listens are essentially a free public resource for anyone who pays a minuscule subscription fee. Books and movies seem to be retaining pricing power for some reason. I feel like the ultimate reason behind this is that books and movies take a lot more time and attention to consume. I know for me, I would be far more inclined to read and watch more of them if it were easier to break them up into chunks. Give me a specialized movie player that lets me pause and start movies by scene, make individual books and movies super cheap, sure, I don't mind paying cable-like fees for something actually useful and I'd watch movies a scene at a time by the dozen. Give me a feed reader that mixes in book chapters, in order, with my normal news feed. Essentially, I don't want to waste time on crappy platforms. Just give me the damn content in a way that makes sense for me to use it. I may get to the point where my appetite for information is so voracious, I'll just mass pirate stuff and upload it all into a personal database so I can chunk it myself.

BlackMonday 8y ago
> What I really liked about it is how it forces publishing companies to truly make knowledge available for everyone. I haven't read the article yet, but wow will that interact with: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/eus-copyright-proposal-extremely-bad-news-everyone-even-especially-wikipedia https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/eus-copyright-proposal... [0] [0] https://act1.openmedia.org/savethelink https://act1.openmedia.org/savethelink

walshemj 8y ago

And the unification, industrial revolutions, Bismark and all those wars had nothing to do with it - seems a very narrow view of 19th century German history

veddox 8y ago
I see the article more as pointing out one aspect that is often ignored - not as invalidating all those other aspects.

cleansy 8y ago

The historian claims that the missing copyright is "the real reason" for industrial expansion. I think it's "only" a contributing factor. Germany was divided in many smaller states and every state had their own universities. Many of these states were competing with each other about talent. So instead of centralising everything they had a distributed scholary culture. That's probably why there was a culture of "thinkers and readers". EDIT: Hence why a copyright law was not really enforcable. So the root cause was the division and competition, the missing law just a symptom of it IMHO. Plus: lot's of iron and coal easily accessible and many big commercially usable rivers for transportation.

profalseidol 8y ago

Wonder what kinds of software we have now if we didn't have Copyright Law for source code too?

pitchups 8y ago

The fashion industry is another example of an area that has thrived because of a lack of copyrights, as argued is this TED talk : "Copyright law's grip on film, music and software barely touches the fashion industry ... and fashion benefits in both innovation and sales, says Johanna Blakley. In her talk, she talks about what all creative industries can learn from fashion's free culture.." https://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture https://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashi...