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> I'm going to mostly ignore your claims that intellectual property protection are required for innovation, and just mention these: quicksort, most network prot
by dctoedt 16y ago
> I'm going to mostly ignore your claims that intellectual property protection are required for innovation, and just mention these: quicksort, most network protocols, loads of page replacement algorithms, tons of programming languages and implementations, etc.
IP protection might not always be required for innovation, but if you compare countries that have "fair and balanced" IP protection -- really, property rights generally -- against those that don't, you find that the former seem to do better in fostering innovation.
Certainly there are people and companies who create things for the joy of it, for reputation, for the indirect benefits that come from the existence of a widely-adopted standard, for purely-altruistic reasons, etc. Good for them; the world needs more of them.
But sometimes creators need to get actual money, from others who don't necessarily share the joy, to buy equipment, travel, hired help, and other things. And that usually entails a legal system that helps innovation investors recoup the 'capital' they put at risk.
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> ... a patent/copyright/etc. on a piece of software or a digital media file is quite literally a claim of ownership of a natural number.
Does that mean that JK Rowling is claiming ownership of the letters A, B, etc.?
- baddox 16y agoThere may be confounding variables when comparing nations' IP protection laws. I don't think that, in a world without IP protection, people would only create things for joy, reputation, standard adoption, or altruism. Companies would still want software, and would be willing to pay people to develop it. Lack of IP protection isn't the same thing as the Free Software Movement. In a world with IP protection, you could still sell proprietary software without disclosing source code. There would still be an incentive for competing companies to constantly improve their software to outdo each other. I don't understand your Rowling analogy. What I'm saying is that Rowling's copyright of one of her books is equivalent to ownership of, for example, the natural number equal to the ASCII encoding of the text of the book.
- baddox 16y agoThere may be confounding variables when comparing nations' IP protection laws. I don't think that, in a world without IP protection, people would only create things for joy, reputation, standard adoption, or altruism. Companies would still want software, and would be willing to pay people to develop it. Lack of IP protection isn't the same thing as the Free Software Movement. In a world with IP protection, you could still sell proprietary software without disclosing source code. There would still be an incentive for competing companies to constantly improve their software to outdo each other. I don't understand your Rowling analogy. What I'm saying is that Rowling's copyright of one of her books is equivalent to ownership of, for example, the natural number equal to the ASCII encoding of the text of the book.