4 ms·

> A world where you can release a chip or a drug or a jet engine and have a Chinese company immediately copy it and sell a competitor at a fraction of the price

by jMyles 8y ago

> A world where you can release a chip or a drug or a jet engine and have a Chinese company immediately copy it and sell a competitor at a fraction of the price with no consequences is one that’s not good for Silicon Valley in the long run. I have no problem living in a world where the government is unable to exact violence against people for copying data. This seems to me to be an entirely artificial crime whose existence has been important for humanity so far, but which is now a human rights affront.

monochromatic 8y ago
What changed it from being important to being a human rights affront?
- jMyles 8y ago
  The evolution of the internet and remix culture. Things are different now with respect to IP than they were when Tesla was filing patents. Don't you think?
rayiner 8y ago
That’s the tail wagging the dog. People point to restrictions on individuals, like preventing people from copying songs for friends, but the dog here is business models like Youtube’s or Huawei’s built on free riding. The human rights angle doesn’t have the same weight when you’re talking about profit-seeking business practices.
twtw 8y ago
I genuinely do not understand your position. Let's say a U.S. company spends a billion dollars creating a chip design. You think that it should not be illegal for other companies to steal said chip design and manufacture it because it is just "copying data?" So the company that invested to design has to compete with a company that stole it, and therefore can price it lower because they don't have to recoup that investment? Just because something can be copied more easily now than when it required a bunch of photocopying doesn't mean it isn't (or shouldn't be) a crime.
- mrmyers 8y ago
  Let's say I spend $300 and countless hours growing an amazing garden of especially fragrant plants. Do you honestly think it should not be illegal for some random guy on the street to walk by and steal my lovely-smelling air by literally 'taking' a sniff? He put absolutely no effort into making that air as fragrant as it is, but gets to reap all the benefit, while I'm stuck paying the fertilizer and gardening bills. I can understand (though I disagree with) the pragmatic arguments you could make for copyright and patents for incentivizing creation. I cannot understand your insistence on pretending that copying information is actually stealing. You can't even plead technical legal truth, as they are absolutely not conflated legally. But when push comes to shove, this argument seems to reach for some 'moral' truth that one 'deserves' to be compensated for one's labor proportionately to one's investment, which is ultimately applied no where else in our society, since it's just the labor theory of value in a funny wig. Let's say a mother spends tens of thousands and countless hours raising a child who never calls or supports her in her old age. Is this illegal? Our society depends much more crucially on the free labor of mothers and fathers than on the R&D of any chip company, even in purely economic terms. Pragmatically, one could say that people just don't seem to need as many guarantees/incentives to have kids as they do to innovate, so it's more important to have state incentives for the latter, and a temporary monopoly on usage is a sufficiently time-tested incentive. I can sort-of understand that argument. What I can't do, is somehow pretend that anyone should care more about the efforts of innovation going unrewarded than of any of the other crucial efforts essential to our society, for which no one is ever guaranteed a dime.
  - twtw 8y ago
    Your garden analogy is poor for several reasons. the primary reason is that it is not remotely comparable to the theft of trade secrets in my example. If the gardener put their garden in a greenhouse and put a padlock on the door, then the scenario would be more comparable, but then it wouldn't make a lot of sense to say it should "obviously" be legal for someone to break in and take a sniff, because it's just a sniff, right? Your parent/child analogy is poor because you are just describing an investment that doesn't pay off for any number of reasons, not that somebody stole the value from you. Perhaps more comparable would be if a parent raised a child until adulthood, at which point someone stole the young adult, brainwashed them to think they were the parents, and the child visited the fake parents in their old age. That sounds far fetched, but it is far more comparable to the scenario I introduced of someone stealing a company's intellectual property and profiting off of it.

by jMyles 8y ago

monochromatic 8y ago

What changed it from being important to being a human rights affront?

jMyles 8y ago
The evolution of the internet and remix culture. Things are different now with respect to IP than they were when Tesla was filing patents. Don't you think?

rayiner 8y ago

That’s the tail wagging the dog. People point to restrictions on individuals, like preventing people from copying songs for friends, but the dog here is business models like Youtube’s or Huawei’s built on free riding. The human rights angle doesn’t have the same weight when you’re talking about profit-seeking business practices.

twtw 8y ago

I genuinely do not understand your position. Let's say a U.S. company spends a billion dollars creating a chip design. You think that it should not be illegal for other companies to steal said chip design and manufacture it because it is just "copying data?" So the company that invested to design has to compete with a company that stole it, and therefore can price it lower because they don't have to recoup that investment? Just because something can be copied more easily now than when it required a bunch of photocopying doesn't mean it isn't (or shouldn't be) a crime.

mrmyers 8y ago
Let's say I spend $300 and countless hours growing an amazing garden of especially fragrant plants. Do you honestly think it should not be illegal for some random guy on the street to walk by and steal my lovely-smelling air by literally 'taking' a sniff? He put absolutely no effort into making that air as fragrant as it is, but gets to reap all the benefit, while I'm stuck paying the fertilizer and gardening bills. I can understand (though I disagree with) the pragmatic arguments you could make for copyright and patents for incentivizing creation. I cannot understand your insistence on pretending that copying information is actually stealing. You can't even plead technical legal truth, as they are absolutely not conflated legally. But when push comes to shove, this argument seems to reach for some 'moral' truth that one 'deserves' to be compensated for one's labor proportionately to one's investment, which is ultimately applied no where else in our society, since it's just the labor theory of value in a funny wig. Let's say a mother spends tens of thousands and countless hours raising a child who never calls or supports her in her old age. Is this illegal? Our society depends much more crucially on the free labor of mothers and fathers than on the R&D of any chip company, even in purely economic terms. Pragmatically, one could say that people just don't seem to need as many guarantees/incentives to have kids as they do to innovate, so it's more important to have state incentives for the latter, and a temporary monopoly on usage is a sufficiently time-tested incentive. I can sort-of understand that argument. What I can't do, is somehow pretend that anyone should care more about the efforts of innovation going unrewarded than of any of the other crucial efforts essential to our society, for which no one is ever guaranteed a dime.
- twtw 8y ago
  Your garden analogy is poor for several reasons. the primary reason is that it is not remotely comparable to the theft of trade secrets in my example. If the gardener put their garden in a greenhouse and put a padlock on the door, then the scenario would be more comparable, but then it wouldn't make a lot of sense to say it should "obviously" be legal for someone to break in and take a sniff, because it's just a sniff, right? Your parent/child analogy is poor because you are just describing an investment that doesn't pay off for any number of reasons, not that somebody stole the value from you. Perhaps more comparable would be if a parent raised a child until adulthood, at which point someone stole the young adult, brainwashed them to think they were the parents, and the child visited the fake parents in their old age. That sounds far fetched, but it is far more comparable to the scenario I introduced of someone stealing a company's intellectual property and profiting off of it.