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I'll go several steps further: intellectual property is an invalid form of ownership and shouldn't exist at all. Piracy is always a just action because the mono

by pitaj 7y ago

I'll go several steps further: intellectual property is an invalid form of ownership and shouldn't exist at all. Piracy is always a just action because the monopoly over information given to people by the state is morally wrong. "Intellectual property" is fundamentally different from classical property because information is not an exclusive good. If I hold an apple, you cannot hold the same apple, but we can both hold a digital copy with the same information. There is no evidence that intellectual property is necessary for innovation or creative endeavors. There are many many ways to monetize creation including but not limited to subscription, donation, live shows, advertisement, and commission. http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.ht...

ronnie_fr3 7y ago
Yeah right, just hand me over all your lucrative concepts and work, right ?
- pitaj 7y ago
  All of my public work is open source under the MIT license. Just because you aren't protected by the government, doesn't mean you can't protect your inventions through secrecy.
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    Secrecy only works for some types of work.
  - EvanAnderson 7y ago
    This is one of the points I'm more pragmatic about. Secrecy breeds loss. The products of human creative toil should be kept and enjoyed by all, versus being locked-up being veils of secrecy that inevitably lead to their loss. The only way to preserve ideas is for them to proliferate.
    - wolfgke 7y ago
      > The products of human creative toil should be kept and enjoyed by all, versus being locked-up being veils of secrecy that inevitably lead to their loss. Tell that to Disney: > https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Disney_Vault&oldid=912674444 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Disney_Vault&oldi... UPDATE: Another example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20810558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20810558
- Zigurd 7y ago
  You can pirate all my books, and the top-selling ones are easiest to find. I have a notification set when Google finds new pirate sources, and those notifications roughly track the sales of the books. The download sites are all in developing countries where the books are not available except by import that would cost 10X or more US buying power relative to price. In other words, I lost very little income to piracy despite publishers no longer bothering to try to take down piracy sites. In fact it's an open question if piracy helped sell more books because of engagement from readers in developing countries I would not have reached but for piracy. The explicitly stated purpose of the copyright clause is not to protect "your lucrative concepts." It is “To promote the progress of science and useful arts," a collective benefit. So if optimal promotion of "science and the useful arts," not commerce, notably, means setting the terms to short, very short, or zero, that's perfectly legal.
daenz 7y ago
Not to mention that legal "damages" for IP piracy has an upper bound of infinity. Some fixed "cost" multiplied by the number of times you seeded the file, and how many times your peers seeded the file to their peers, etc.
Crinus 7y ago
The problem with these "many many ways" are that those that tend to work better also tend to be user hostile (subscriptions for things that have no reason to be provided as a service instead of as a product), make the users the products themselves (e.g. advertising), be privacy nightmares (like both the previous examples, at least for the majority of cases), etc. At the end of the day the plain old "give me money to give you thing" works the best for all parties involved (assuming said parties want to be involved), despite any drawbacks. Also as a programmer i'm not sure how i'd go about doing a live show :-P
- npongratz 7y ago
  > Also as a programmer i'm not sure how i'd go about doing a live show :-P I see live coding happening all over Youtube and Twitch.
  - dragandj 7y ago
    How many tickets have you bought for live coding shows?
    - cameronbrown 7y ago
      Huh? Tickets are an outdated concept on internet platforms. Space is unlimited and advertising can sustain a channel just fine. Edit: Medium sized channel.
      - jfim 7y ago
        According to Quora [0], ad revenue from YouTube is about $1 per thousand views. I doubt that programming live streaming is mainstream enough to be sustainable from ads alone. [0] https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-YouTube-pay-per-1000-views-How-where-can-I-get-sponsor-to-have-enough-capital-from-nothing-and-be-a-successful-company https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-YouTube-pay-per-1000-vie...
        cameronbrown 7y ago
Zigurd 7y ago
Intellectual "property" should, at least, be a controversial form of "property." Starting with the fact that the clause in the US constitution that gave us patent and copyright exclusivity for a limited term doesn't contain the word "property." The word is tendentious. It's a weak right, if it is one: The term of exclusivity is set by statute. Imagine real property rights having a fixed term defined by the whim of Congress. Indeed imagine any right needing to be enumerated, explicitly, and then thrown to Congress to set a time limit on it. Nonetheless the Framers thought it worth putting in the Constitution and so we have a duty to keep this right from being controlled by big publishing interests, big pharma, etc. (also not mentioned in the Copyright Clause, just authors and inventors). Indexing the term of copyright exclusivity to US life expectancy, for example, might make us think harder about a range of national policies.
shados 7y ago
The various content industries already had to move to models that assume everything will be pirated since its so common and accepted. For some the result was not bad. Even good (Spotify and co are pretty cool, at least for a casual user like myself). Some were downright awful. Games with DRM, always online requirements, decline of AAA quality single player game (at least proportionally) and user hostile monetization (micro transaction). In a magical world where we actually had enforceable IP/piracy laws, but reasonable IP terms, I wonder how different things would be. Some stuff would likely be worse. Some would likely be better. But for sure things would be very different.
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  A magical world where such laws can be enforceable would be the same world where people have less freedoms than slaves ever had, as enforcing copyright is fundamentally incompatible with most freedoms.
  - shados 7y ago
    Let me ask. If you had to make a choice between "obeying copyright laws (where copyright is granted for 7 years, no more and fair use clauses are a thing), or being a literal slave (by the definition most people think of when you use that term), you'd pick the latter? Sorry, I call bullshit and gross exaggeration.
bena 7y ago
> There are many many ways to monetize creation including but not limited to subscription, donation, live shows, advertisement, and commission. Aka, "there are many ways I can personally avoid for paying for the efforts of others". I've never seen an argument for piracy that has not descended into "I'm not paying". Everyone seems perfectly ok with someone else paying the cost of creation. And no shit. Who is paying for all this creation that you enjoy?
rayiner 7y ago
> Intellectual property" is fundamentally different from classical property because information is not an exclusive good. If I hold an apple, you cannot hold the same apple, but we can both hold a digital copy with the same information. That’s one difference, sure. But another difference is that intellectual property must be created by people, while other kinds of property often are created naturally. Somebody had to make Harry Potter. My yard was just there naturally. Why shouldn’t the property right in Harry Potter be stronger than that for land? Why is one kind of difference dispositive and the other not?
- pitaj 7y ago
  Your yard was not there naturally, unless you call a section of untouched forest "your yard". Every piece of property must be improved by labor in some way. That is how property is created in the first place: homesteading involves investing your labor into untouched land to own it, as one example.
  - reroute1 7y ago
    No, that's not true. Real estate can be purchased and owned, resold over and over without being improved by labor. Land property is not created by laboring on it, in fact it was always there.
    - bediger4000 7y ago
      Yes, that's true, even if the "improvement" is merely to define property lines and locations. If property lines aren't there, it effectively doesn't exist. I mean, yes, some chunk of continental crust exists, but it's not "property" if you can't define it.
      - reroute1 7y ago
        If you completely redefine "improvement" and "labor" then sure.
    - pitaj 7y ago
xhkkffbf 7y ago
This is terribly naive. When digital replication is easy -- as it is with arts like music or software -- piracy destroys innovation and hurts creators who want to earn a living by selling their creations. It's not like the farmers or the apartment owners are going to let people "pirate" a warm place to sleep or a good meal. IP haters often point to people who've successfully managed to encourage pseudo-piracy and made money. The Grateful Dead, for instance, let people freely copy mix tapes of their concerts and made their money on gate revenues. (They didn't let people in for free. Nope. ) If digital piracy is unchecked, then it forces artists to dream up other ways to make money. This creates inefficiencies and it just isn't fair to those who just want to sell their creations without holding a concert or drumming up some other scheme to get people to pay. Most "open source" companies spend endless hours trying to concoct ways to open source just enough of their product while forcing enough people to pay so everyone can eat. I've found that most of the people who speak like pitaj are in universities and they make their money through some mixture of outrageous tuition bills that can't be dodged or government funding from taxes that can't be escaped. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
- tictoc 7y ago
  I don't think people stealing would stop an artist from creating art. I think for people who view it as an ends to a mean, and make a living, it might make them seek other means of employment. But for the idealistic morons out there who create for the sake of creating, this wouldn't stop them in the least bit.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > But for the idealistic morons out there who create for the sake of creating, this wouldn't stop them in the least bit. You'll notice the bait-and-switch modern society does here. We're supposed to value and respect artists, because they're "morons (...) who create for the sake of creating", who want to express their feelings and communicate their thoughts. And then we're given "artists" whose primary purpose is to make money through their creative works. I think we shouldn't be calling these two groups of people using the same word.
EvanAnderson 7y ago
My opinions used to be similar to yours. The current copyright regime in the US, as well as the application of patents to software and "business processes", both feel like abuses and perversions of the original intent of US patent and copyright law. Having said that, I've become a bit more pragmatic over time. I can see value in limited-time monopolies being granted by statute. (Can you imagine the wacky alternatives that private individuals and companies would write into contracts if "IP" law didn't exist?) Limited-time, being a major sticking-point with me, and something that really needs to fixed under the current US copyright regime.
- pitaj 7y ago
  > (Can you imagine the wacky alternatives that private individuals and companies would write into contracts if "IP" law didn't exist?) There are countless examples of trade secrets that exists in this exact state. These things are already in employment contracts.
- JTbane 7y ago
  Yeah, software patents are absolutely awful. Source code is like a written recipe, you absolutely should be able to copyright it. But you shouldn't be able to patent it. All software patents do is encourage lawsuits and trolling.
  - teddyh 7y ago
    > Source code is like a written recipe, you absolutely should be able to copyright it. But you can’t copyright recipies, AFAIK.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
raven105x 7y ago
If it took you three billion dollars and five years to conceptualize an apple that cured something, and suddenly it was commonwealth, nobody would look for apples that cured something, and we'd go back to the dark ages. Ideologies must be evaluated on what they functionally incentivize in a society - and this proposition makes R&D investment equivalent to financial suicide.
- yes-except-no 7y ago
  *the people that have three billion available would not do it, because their interest is making more of those billions. Anyone with any inkling of morals to their characters would say yes and make the apple. Anyone valuing society even the tiniest bit would.
- lxwang 7y ago
  Abolishing patents is radical enough to begin with, so why stop there? If everyone had UBI and free healthcare to cover the material costs of living, is it really so implausible that people who were interested in looking for apples that cured something would do so? That aside, the obvious answer would be to publicly fund this kind of activity that we deem beneficial to society.
- username90 7y ago
  > If it took you three billion dollars and five years to conceptualize an apple that cured something, and suddenly it was commonwealth, nobody would look for apples that cured something This can be solved by government grants, a high but still normal VAT on all medicine purchases is enough to cover all our current medicine research costs, you'd just have to earmark it.
tstegart 7y ago
I'm suspicious of this argument. If you don't have any intellectual property laws, can't anyone just duplicate all of those methods you mentioned? If Marvel releases a movie, I can steal it and ask people to subscribe to my stolen movie service, donate to it, show it using advertisements, write a live show using the script, etc. About the only way I can't steal it is through commission, but then how is the person paying the commission getting their money back? This seems like it wouldn't work.
- gpm 7y ago
  I suppose you don't need IP to have contracts that prevent redistribution... I'm not sure that's what OP is going for though.
  - bena 7y ago
    If only there was some system to sort of implicitly grant creators the ability to control who gets to redistribute their works. Like if they had some sort of rights on what their intellect has produced. But what would we call it?
- pitaj 7y ago
  Creators don't have exclusive control over their past works, but they do have control over their future works. That is how those monetization strategies work. > If Marvel releases a movie, I can steal it and ask people to subscribe to my stolen movie service, donate to it, show it using advertisements, write a live show using the script, etc Yes, you can do that. But you don't have access to that movie until it's released, so Marvel can sell release access to theaters and streaming services. They can crowd-fund new movies by selling exclusive early access to the final product. They can sell merchandise and other media that integrates with the movie. Perhaps they can sell super-high-quality physical media for collectors. Obviously people are willing to pay money to see these movies. The questions is how to connect Marvel with that money, which I'm sure they can figure out. > About the only way I can't steal it is through commission, but then how is the person paying the commission getting their money back? Artists selling their services for commission is mostly seen for smaller works of art, like paintings / drawings or short animations.
falcolas 7y ago
> There is no evidence that intellectual property is necessary for innovation or creative endeavors. Just ask yourself if Avengers - if the entire franchise of Marvel movies - would have been made if not for IP protections that allowed the costs of making those movies to be recouped; that allowed those movies to be profitable for the investors. Ask yourself if we would have all the books we currently have from Steven King (or George R.R. Martin, or Stan Lee, or any other commercially popular author) if copyright (a form of IP protection) did not exist. The answer is "No". There are a few options for people to put their work up for free online, but if you've read or watched those, you realize that the quality is nowhere near a professionally written and edited novel or a movie with millions of post-production work budget.
- utf985 7y ago
  You're saying that as if Marvel movies are some kind of pinnacle of creativity and quality. In fact, an argument could be made using those same movies as an example, that these excessive IP laws have the exact opposite effect and actually end up stunting creativity and originality as the big corporations aim to milk every last penny from decades old franchises and ideas, instead of seeking new and original concepts, because the former is a far more profitable endeavor. I mean, look at the state of Hollywood right now - when was the last time you saw a truly novel and noteworthy movie, not based on an already established franchise/idea/series?
  - falcolas 7y ago
    What's better - high quality and enjoyable, but derivative entertainment, or a substantial drop in the amount of available entertainment? Have no doubt, even truly creative works would suffer, since there's no incentive for investors to invest even in truly creative work, since there's no monetary return on investment - just a movie which they can't monetize. Imagine if George RR Martin had to hold a day job in addition to writing - how many books would he have actually written by this point?
    - utf985 7y ago
      I'd say that the abundance of (arguably) high quality derivative content is the worse option. Mostly because the alternative to that is not necessarily a lack of choice. In my experience, in recent years I've found to enjoy lot more independently produced content (which either happens to be free or very cheaply available) as opposed to big budget titles produced by big corporations. Not because I actively seek such content, but because I genuinely find it to be more worthwhile and enjoyable than the other option. Now I can't really speak for motion pictures, because I don't watch tv shows and movies anymore - but I can definitely say this is very true for the music and video game industries - big investment and quality are not correlated.
jumpman500 7y ago
What about Plagiarism though? That's the main point of intellectual property. If someone writes a song and it's really good. It's about the artist's life, full of personal stuff that only that artist could think of. It's this artist's master piece. But then a more popular artists decides to steal it and makes it becomes more successful. The more popular artist doesn't owe anything to the original creator? I think IP is definitely abused, but still a lot of cases were it can protect people.
- pitaj 7y ago
  If somebody makes a better version then good for them.
  - jumpman500 7y ago
    Would you feel the same if it was you or your friend who had their life's work stolen? Would you be alright watching someone make a fortune off of your work and not even acknowledge they owe you?
- reacweb 7y ago
  Do not mix copyright with IP. Copyright is useful for artists.
  - pitaj 7y ago
    Copyright is a form of IP.
- finnthehuman 7y ago
  That’s not plagiarism. Plagiarism is is passing off someone else’s work as your own. The bounds or plagiarism have no ties to the legal bounds of what is or isn’t copyright infringement. You can have either one without the other, or both at the same time.
  - jumpman500 7y ago
    In my scenario the more popular artist is pretending to be the original creator and stealing their work. But imagine any plagiarism scenario. Someone republishing Harry Potter under their name for instance. How can you prosecute someone for plagiarism without copyright laws?
scarejunba 7y ago
Interesting stance. Do you act in a manner consistent with this stance? (i.e. are all your works CC-Zero or equivalent?)
throwaway_law 7y ago
>intellectual property is an invalid form of ownership and shouldn't exist at all....If I hold an apple, you cannot hold the same apple, but we can both hold a digital copy with the same information. What if you manufacture a computer under a company you name Apple, and manufacture/sell computers under the mark "Apple" and even have a "Apple logo." Do you believe other companies should be able to infringe on your name, mark and logo? What if other manufacturers are attempting to decieve the public by trading off the good will and value you built in the name? What if other manufacturers are purposefully flooding the market with cheap knock offs of your machines and the public can't tell the difference, so they stop buying your machines and the value of your company/brand goes down to zero?
- ttoinou 7y ago
  It's all a matter of who you (or customers) want to trust. In the case you mentioned, we'll need better way to source what material / virtual content is produced by whom and where.
- pitaj 7y ago
  Trademark is pretty different from copyright and patents. This is because claiming to be another party or claiming your product is their product is fraud.
  - beefhash 7y ago
    That's not what grandparent claimed, though. "Intellectual property" is an umbrella term for copyright, trademarks, patents, design protection laws, etc. throwaway_law's retort seems justified to me.
    - pitaj 7y ago
      I am the grandparent. I should have excluded trademark when I referred to IP but let me make it completely clear. By IP I am referring to copyright and patents.
      - 7y ago
gfodor 7y ago
This post lacks counterfactual reasoning. The question around IP law isn't if it's possible for creative work to be created without it, which is obviously true, but what creative works would be created (and what creative works would not be created) if IP law didn't exist. Is your claim that the set of creative works we have today would exist in full without IP law? Because that is a bold claim, and rather easily refutable through any single example where a company's primary competitive advantage hinges upon IP rights. Potential examples abound. You can argue that the tradeoffs in IP law are not good tradeoffs. But your post seems to think that there would be no tradeoff -- that simply we'd get all the benefits conferred to society (in the form of creative works), with none of the downsides, if we eliminated IP protections. The burden of proof is on you for that one, since I'm sure if you surveyed any company relying upon IP protections in any non-trivial way, they'd indicate that capital would have been allocated elsewhere if not for those protections.
- sieabahlpark 7y ago
  I'm glad someone has said this, it's one thing to want the IP law altered but to assume that nothing would change if IP law didn't exist seems naive.
- pitaj 7y ago
  > The question around IP law isn't if it's possible for creative work to be created without it, which is obviously true, but what creative works would be created (and what creative works would not be created) if IP law didn't exist. Those are bad questions, and unanswerable on all accounts. They also don't help us because then we have to compare the subjective values of creations to pick which is better, which is impossible since it varies person-to-person. One question we could ask is "How much money flows from a consumers to creators under both systems?" That question is still hard to answer, but at least the answer would have meaning. > Is your claim that the set of creative works we have today would exist in full without IP law? I don't claim that everything would be the same without IP laws. However, I certainly think it would be better if they didn't exist. > rather easily refutable through any single example where a company's primary competitive advantage hinges upon IP rights. Potential examples abound. It doesn't really matter but I am curious what companies you're referring to that aren't acting as parasitic rent-seeking middlemen. > You can argue that the tradeoffs in IP law are not good tradeoffs. But your post seems to think that there would be no tradeoff -- that simply we'd get all the benefits conferred to society (in the form of creative works), with none of the downsides, if we eliminated IP protections. I don't see any evidence that lifting IP protections will result in a decrease in quantity or quality of creative works as a whole. > The burden of proof is on you for that one, since I'm sure if you surveyed any company relying upon IP protections in any non-trivial way, they'd indicate that capital would have been allocated elsewhere if not for those protections. Let's make it clear what you're advocating for: continued state action that benefits a minority of the population at the expense of consumers by providing the members of that minority with an artificially enforced monopoly on information. Your argument is the status quo fallacy. Just because something currently exists, does not mean I have the burden of proof. In fact, it is you who must prove that IP is beneficial. I cannot prove a negative (that IP is not necessary or beneficial) and asking me to do so is irrational. That's like asking abolitionists to prove that slavery isn't necessary for the economy. (Sorry for the inflammatory example but it's what came to mind)
calimac 7y ago
The Inbalance of the current structure was established affectively by Disney and the movie music entertainment lawyers of Hollywood destroyed any semblance of reason. It must be restructured to compensate creators and allow free information or better said democracy of knowledge.
logfromblammo 7y ago
Kill copyright. Curtail patent. Keep trademark. In the absence of government-enforced monopoly, I think the next-best alternative for creatives would be to cartelize, trading new content for subscription fees covering a range of convenience services related to creative content, such as a recommendations engine, discoverability, favorites library, notifications, artist-specific storefronts, &c. Pay $10/month or $100/year to the cartel, and from that, the cartel pays its participating artists a guaranteed stipend for living expenses, bonuses for each new work added to the cartel's library, a bonus for each work that meets a positive audience-review threshold, a bonus for each work that meets a positive peer-review threshold, and jackpot awards for works deemed particularly notable by peers and patrons. The cartel spends heavily on advertising and promotion, to make new art be perceived as worth the cost of patronage, and portray patronage to the cartel as cool and fashionable. Paying patrons would get first shot at premium sales, such as concert tickets in favorable locations, or the opportunity to buy the original artwork or significant artifacts of the creation process. So you might, through your account with the arts cartel, find a new band whose sound you like, add them to your personal favorites library, be notified that they are playing live near you in October, get pre-sale tickets for the front rows of seats, and order a patron-exclusive band t-shirt to wear when you go. Then you download their newest tracks, and maybe decide they're worth $X to you, so you hit the "tip" button on your app and pay the cartel $Y so that they pay Z% of that directly to the artists. Later, you might get the opportunity to buy the actual hair net that Leadvocal Rockstar wore at the concert in a patron-exclusive auction. Meanwhile, your uncool non-patron friends are stuck listening to Top-40 format radio stations, because it's the most reliable curated content outside the arts cartel and the soulless corporate culture-for-consumption factories. Disney has proven that a giant aggregation of art-producers can sustain itself on almost pure self-promotion. Disney is a humongous self-reinforcing advertisement for itself, carrying multiple viable brands, each targeting different audience demographics. Disney could certainly survive loss of copyright protection, but they would definitely make less money without it, and may have trouble adapting to the new cash flows due to sheer hugeness.
mdszy 7y ago
Tell that to all sorts of companies who make billions of dollars off IP Remember that IP isn't just music and movies and digital data that you as random Joe or Jane Consumer want. It includes trade secrets, design patents, etc. You probably don't give a damn about the IP of a tissue mill that includes production data and information about how they run their machines to get a perfect roll of toilet paper every time, but the companies I work with give a lot of a damn about that and have no desire to share that information with anyone ever and hold onto that IP like their life depends on it (because it very well might) You have to remember that "IP" isn't just stuff that you might want. You have to look past your own nose a little.
Aloha 7y ago
I see no reason Intellectual Property shouldn't exist, it however shouldn't extend indefinitely, problem is - it basically now extends well beyond the time it should, and casts a huge net over stuff that has little to no commercial value, and no obvious ownership.
dwild 7y ago
> There are many many ways to monetize creation including but not limited to subscription, donation, live shows, advertisement, and commission. But then it would be legal to duplicate it and thus you can remove paid subscription and paid live shows from your possibilities. What's remains is ads/commission that you do block (the internet never forget [0]). Donations then should be the only way to make content? That seems quite bad... [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20205076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20205076
scarface74 7y ago
So should software developers do “live shows” of their coding or depend on the kindness of others? As far as how well advertising works for content, aren’t we seeing enough issues with that now between ad ridden sites and pay to win games?
MaxBarraclough 7y ago
> "Intellectual property" is fundamentally different from classical property because information is not an exclusive good. If I hold an apple, you cannot hold the same apple, but we can both hold a digital copy with the same information. All concepts of ownership are human constructs. We have copyright because of its utility, not for some analogy to conventional ownership in law. > There are many many ways to monetize creation including but not limited to subscription, donation, live shows, advertisement, and commission. I don't see anyone making high-budget movies under any revenue models other than as-a-product and as-a-service, both of which fail in the absence of copyright. > There is no evidence that intellectual property is necessary for innovation or creative endeavors. Given that whole industries are based on copyright, I rather think the onus is on you to make the case that getting rid of it wouldn't be ruinous.
paggle 7y ago
Forms of “ownership” are human created incentives towards particular behaviors. Land ownership incentivizes investment and reduces territorial violence. Child custody is a form of ownership that promotes family stability. The purpose of intellectual ownership in the US is explicitly to “promote the Useful Arts.” There is not supposed to be any theoretical justification for it, only empirical.

by pitaj 7y ago

ronnie_fr3 7y ago

Yeah right, just hand me over all your lucrative concepts and work, right ?

pitaj 7y ago
All of my public work is open source under the MIT license. Just because you aren't protected by the government, doesn't mean you can't protect your inventions through secrecy.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  Secrecy only works for some types of work.
- EvanAnderson 7y ago
  This is one of the points I'm more pragmatic about. Secrecy breeds loss. The products of human creative toil should be kept and enjoyed by all, versus being locked-up being veils of secrecy that inevitably lead to their loss. The only way to preserve ideas is for them to proliferate.
  - wolfgke 7y ago
    > The products of human creative toil should be kept and enjoyed by all, versus being locked-up being veils of secrecy that inevitably lead to their loss. Tell that to Disney: > https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Disney_Vault&oldid=912674444 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Disney_Vault&oldi... UPDATE: Another example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20810558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20810558
Zigurd 7y ago
You can pirate all my books, and the top-selling ones are easiest to find. I have a notification set when Google finds new pirate sources, and those notifications roughly track the sales of the books. The download sites are all in developing countries where the books are not available except by import that would cost 10X or more US buying power relative to price. In other words, I lost very little income to piracy despite publishers no longer bothering to try to take down piracy sites. In fact it's an open question if piracy helped sell more books because of engagement from readers in developing countries I would not have reached but for piracy. The explicitly stated purpose of the copyright clause is not to protect "your lucrative concepts." It is “To promote the progress of science and useful arts," a collective benefit. So if optimal promotion of "science and the useful arts," not commerce, notably, means setting the terms to short, very short, or zero, that's perfectly legal.

daenz 7y ago

Not to mention that legal "damages" for IP piracy has an upper bound of infinity. Some fixed "cost" multiplied by the number of times you seeded the file, and how many times your peers seeded the file to their peers, etc.

Crinus 7y ago

The problem with these "many many ways" are that those that tend to work better also tend to be user hostile (subscriptions for things that have no reason to be provided as a service instead of as a product), make the users the products themselves (e.g. advertising), be privacy nightmares (like both the previous examples, at least for the majority of cases), etc. At the end of the day the plain old "give me money to give you thing" works the best for all parties involved (assuming said parties want to be involved), despite any drawbacks. Also as a programmer i'm not sure how i'd go about doing a live show :-P

npongratz 7y ago
> Also as a programmer i'm not sure how i'd go about doing a live show :-P I see live coding happening all over Youtube and Twitch.
- dragandj 7y ago
  How many tickets have you bought for live coding shows?
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    Huh? Tickets are an outdated concept on internet platforms. Space is unlimited and advertising can sustain a channel just fine. Edit: Medium sized channel.
    - jfim 7y ago
      According to Quora [0], ad revenue from YouTube is about $1 per thousand views. I doubt that programming live streaming is mainstream enough to be sustainable from ads alone. [0] https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-YouTube-pay-per-1000-views-How-where-can-I-get-sponsor-to-have-enough-capital-from-nothing-and-be-a-successful-company https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-YouTube-pay-per-1000-vie...
      - cameronbrown 7y ago

Zigurd 7y ago

Intellectual "property" should, at least, be a controversial form of "property." Starting with the fact that the clause in the US constitution that gave us patent and copyright exclusivity for a limited term doesn't contain the word "property." The word is tendentious. It's a weak right, if it is one: The term of exclusivity is set by statute. Imagine real property rights having a fixed term defined by the whim of Congress. Indeed imagine any right needing to be enumerated, explicitly, and then thrown to Congress to set a time limit on it. Nonetheless the Framers thought it worth putting in the Constitution and so we have a duty to keep this right from being controlled by big publishing interests, big pharma, etc. (also not mentioned in the Copyright Clause, just authors and inventors). Indexing the term of copyright exclusivity to US life expectancy, for example, might make us think harder about a range of national policies.

shados 7y ago

The various content industries already had to move to models that assume everything will be pirated since its so common and accepted. For some the result was not bad. Even good (Spotify and co are pretty cool, at least for a casual user like myself). Some were downright awful. Games with DRM, always online requirements, decline of AAA quality single player game (at least proportionally) and user hostile monetization (micro transaction). In a magical world where we actually had enforceable IP/piracy laws, but reasonable IP terms, I wonder how different things would be. Some stuff would likely be worse. Some would likely be better. But for sure things would be very different.

zzzcpan 7y ago
A magical world where such laws can be enforceable would be the same world where people have less freedoms than slaves ever had, as enforcing copyright is fundamentally incompatible with most freedoms.
- shados 7y ago
  Let me ask. If you had to make a choice between "obeying copyright laws (where copyright is granted for 7 years, no more and fair use clauses are a thing), or being a literal slave (by the definition most people think of when you use that term), you'd pick the latter? Sorry, I call bullshit and gross exaggeration.

bena 7y ago

> There are many many ways to monetize creation including but not limited to subscription, donation, live shows, advertisement, and commission. Aka, "there are many ways I can personally avoid for paying for the efforts of others". I've never seen an argument for piracy that has not descended into "I'm not paying". Everyone seems perfectly ok with someone else paying the cost of creation. And no shit. Who is paying for all this creation that you enjoy?

rayiner 7y ago

> Intellectual property" is fundamentally different from classical property because information is not an exclusive good. If I hold an apple, you cannot hold the same apple, but we can both hold a digital copy with the same information. That’s one difference, sure. But another difference is that intellectual property must be created by people, while other kinds of property often are created naturally. Somebody had to make Harry Potter. My yard was just there naturally. Why shouldn’t the property right in Harry Potter be stronger than that for land? Why is one kind of difference dispositive and the other not?

pitaj 7y ago
Your yard was not there naturally, unless you call a section of untouched forest "your yard". Every piece of property must be improved by labor in some way. That is how property is created in the first place: homesteading involves investing your labor into untouched land to own it, as one example.
- reroute1 7y ago
  No, that's not true. Real estate can be purchased and owned, resold over and over without being improved by labor. Land property is not created by laboring on it, in fact it was always there.
  - bediger4000 7y ago
    Yes, that's true, even if the "improvement" is merely to define property lines and locations. If property lines aren't there, it effectively doesn't exist. I mean, yes, some chunk of continental crust exists, but it's not "property" if you can't define it.
    - reroute1 7y ago
      If you completely redefine "improvement" and "labor" then sure.
  - pitaj 7y ago

xhkkffbf 7y ago

This is terribly naive. When digital replication is easy -- as it is with arts like music or software -- piracy destroys innovation and hurts creators who want to earn a living by selling their creations. It's not like the farmers or the apartment owners are going to let people "pirate" a warm place to sleep or a good meal. IP haters often point to people who've successfully managed to encourage pseudo-piracy and made money. The Grateful Dead, for instance, let people freely copy mix tapes of their concerts and made their money on gate revenues. (They didn't let people in for free. Nope. ) If digital piracy is unchecked, then it forces artists to dream up other ways to make money. This creates inefficiencies and it just isn't fair to those who just want to sell their creations without holding a concert or drumming up some other scheme to get people to pay. Most "open source" companies spend endless hours trying to concoct ways to open source just enough of their product while forcing enough people to pay so everyone can eat. I've found that most of the people who speak like pitaj are in universities and they make their money through some mixture of outrageous tuition bills that can't be dodged or government funding from taxes that can't be escaped. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

tictoc 7y ago
I don't think people stealing would stop an artist from creating art. I think for people who view it as an ends to a mean, and make a living, it might make them seek other means of employment. But for the idealistic morons out there who create for the sake of creating, this wouldn't stop them in the least bit.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > But for the idealistic morons out there who create for the sake of creating, this wouldn't stop them in the least bit. You'll notice the bait-and-switch modern society does here. We're supposed to value and respect artists, because they're "morons (...) who create for the sake of creating", who want to express their feelings and communicate their thoughts. And then we're given "artists" whose primary purpose is to make money through their creative works. I think we shouldn't be calling these two groups of people using the same word.

EvanAnderson 7y ago

My opinions used to be similar to yours. The current copyright regime in the US, as well as the application of patents to software and "business processes", both feel like abuses and perversions of the original intent of US patent and copyright law. Having said that, I've become a bit more pragmatic over time. I can see value in limited-time monopolies being granted by statute. (Can you imagine the wacky alternatives that private individuals and companies would write into contracts if "IP" law didn't exist?) Limited-time, being a major sticking-point with me, and something that really needs to fixed under the current US copyright regime.

pitaj 7y ago
> (Can you imagine the wacky alternatives that private individuals and companies would write into contracts if "IP" law didn't exist?) There are countless examples of trade secrets that exists in this exact state. These things are already in employment contracts.
JTbane 7y ago
Yeah, software patents are absolutely awful. Source code is like a written recipe, you absolutely should be able to copyright it. But you shouldn't be able to patent it. All software patents do is encourage lawsuits and trolling.
- teddyh 7y ago
  > Source code is like a written recipe, you absolutely should be able to copyright it. But you can’t copyright recipies, AFAIK.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

raven105x 7y ago

If it took you three billion dollars and five years to conceptualize an apple that cured something, and suddenly it was commonwealth, nobody would look for apples that cured something, and we'd go back to the dark ages. Ideologies must be evaluated on what they functionally incentivize in a society - and this proposition makes R&D investment equivalent to financial suicide.

yes-except-no 7y ago
*the people that have three billion available would not do it, because their interest is making more of those billions. Anyone with any inkling of morals to their characters would say yes and make the apple. Anyone valuing society even the tiniest bit would.
lxwang 7y ago
Abolishing patents is radical enough to begin with, so why stop there? If everyone had UBI and free healthcare to cover the material costs of living, is it really so implausible that people who were interested in looking for apples that cured something would do so? That aside, the obvious answer would be to publicly fund this kind of activity that we deem beneficial to society.
username90 7y ago
> If it took you three billion dollars and five years to conceptualize an apple that cured something, and suddenly it was commonwealth, nobody would look for apples that cured something This can be solved by government grants, a high but still normal VAT on all medicine purchases is enough to cover all our current medicine research costs, you'd just have to earmark it.

tstegart 7y ago

I'm suspicious of this argument. If you don't have any intellectual property laws, can't anyone just duplicate all of those methods you mentioned? If Marvel releases a movie, I can steal it and ask people to subscribe to my stolen movie service, donate to it, show it using advertisements, write a live show using the script, etc. About the only way I can't steal it is through commission, but then how is the person paying the commission getting their money back? This seems like it wouldn't work.

gpm 7y ago
I suppose you don't need IP to have contracts that prevent redistribution... I'm not sure that's what OP is going for though.
- bena 7y ago
  If only there was some system to sort of implicitly grant creators the ability to control who gets to redistribute their works. Like if they had some sort of rights on what their intellect has produced. But what would we call it?
pitaj 7y ago
Creators don't have exclusive control over their past works, but they do have control over their future works. That is how those monetization strategies work. > If Marvel releases a movie, I can steal it and ask people to subscribe to my stolen movie service, donate to it, show it using advertisements, write a live show using the script, etc Yes, you can do that. But you don't have access to that movie until it's released, so Marvel can sell release access to theaters and streaming services. They can crowd-fund new movies by selling exclusive early access to the final product. They can sell merchandise and other media that integrates with the movie. Perhaps they can sell super-high-quality physical media for collectors. Obviously people are willing to pay money to see these movies. The questions is how to connect Marvel with that money, which I'm sure they can figure out. > About the only way I can't steal it is through commission, but then how is the person paying the commission getting their money back? Artists selling their services for commission is mostly seen for smaller works of art, like paintings / drawings or short animations.

falcolas 7y ago

> There is no evidence that intellectual property is necessary for innovation or creative endeavors. Just ask yourself if Avengers - if the entire franchise of Marvel movies - would have been made if not for IP protections that allowed the costs of making those movies to be recouped; that allowed those movies to be profitable for the investors. Ask yourself if we would have all the books we currently have from Steven King (or George R.R. Martin, or Stan Lee, or any other commercially popular author) if copyright (a form of IP protection) did not exist. The answer is "No". There are a few options for people to put their work up for free online, but if you've read or watched those, you realize that the quality is nowhere near a professionally written and edited novel or a movie with millions of post-production work budget.

utf985 7y ago
You're saying that as if Marvel movies are some kind of pinnacle of creativity and quality. In fact, an argument could be made using those same movies as an example, that these excessive IP laws have the exact opposite effect and actually end up stunting creativity and originality as the big corporations aim to milk every last penny from decades old franchises and ideas, instead of seeking new and original concepts, because the former is a far more profitable endeavor. I mean, look at the state of Hollywood right now - when was the last time you saw a truly novel and noteworthy movie, not based on an already established franchise/idea/series?
- falcolas 7y ago
  What's better - high quality and enjoyable, but derivative entertainment, or a substantial drop in the amount of available entertainment? Have no doubt, even truly creative works would suffer, since there's no incentive for investors to invest even in truly creative work, since there's no monetary return on investment - just a movie which they can't monetize. Imagine if George RR Martin had to hold a day job in addition to writing - how many books would he have actually written by this point?
  - utf985 7y ago
    I'd say that the abundance of (arguably) high quality derivative content is the worse option. Mostly because the alternative to that is not necessarily a lack of choice. In my experience, in recent years I've found to enjoy lot more independently produced content (which either happens to be free or very cheaply available) as opposed to big budget titles produced by big corporations. Not because I actively seek such content, but because I genuinely find it to be more worthwhile and enjoyable than the other option. Now I can't really speak for motion pictures, because I don't watch tv shows and movies anymore - but I can definitely say this is very true for the music and video game industries - big investment and quality are not correlated.

jumpman500 7y ago

What about Plagiarism though? That's the main point of intellectual property. If someone writes a song and it's really good. It's about the artist's life, full of personal stuff that only that artist could think of. It's this artist's master piece. But then a more popular artists decides to steal it and makes it becomes more successful. The more popular artist doesn't owe anything to the original creator? I think IP is definitely abused, but still a lot of cases were it can protect people.

pitaj 7y ago
If somebody makes a better version then good for them.
- jumpman500 7y ago
  Would you feel the same if it was you or your friend who had their life's work stolen? Would you be alright watching someone make a fortune off of your work and not even acknowledge they owe you?
reacweb 7y ago
Do not mix copyright with IP. Copyright is useful for artists.
- pitaj 7y ago
  Copyright is a form of IP.
finnthehuman 7y ago
That’s not plagiarism. Plagiarism is is passing off someone else’s work as your own. The bounds or plagiarism have no ties to the legal bounds of what is or isn’t copyright infringement. You can have either one without the other, or both at the same time.
- jumpman500 7y ago
  In my scenario the more popular artist is pretending to be the original creator and stealing their work. But imagine any plagiarism scenario. Someone republishing Harry Potter under their name for instance. How can you prosecute someone for plagiarism without copyright laws?

scarejunba 7y ago

Interesting stance. Do you act in a manner consistent with this stance? (i.e. are all your works CC-Zero or equivalent?)

throwaway_law 7y ago

>intellectual property is an invalid form of ownership and shouldn't exist at all....If I hold an apple, you cannot hold the same apple, but we can both hold a digital copy with the same information. What if you manufacture a computer under a company you name Apple, and manufacture/sell computers under the mark "Apple" and even have a "Apple logo." Do you believe other companies should be able to infringe on your name, mark and logo? What if other manufacturers are attempting to decieve the public by trading off the good will and value you built in the name? What if other manufacturers are purposefully flooding the market with cheap knock offs of your machines and the public can't tell the difference, so they stop buying your machines and the value of your company/brand goes down to zero?

ttoinou 7y ago
It's all a matter of who you (or customers) want to trust. In the case you mentioned, we'll need better way to source what material / virtual content is produced by whom and where.
pitaj 7y ago
Trademark is pretty different from copyright and patents. This is because claiming to be another party or claiming your product is their product is fraud.
- beefhash 7y ago
  That's not what grandparent claimed, though. "Intellectual property" is an umbrella term for copyright, trademarks, patents, design protection laws, etc. throwaway_law's retort seems justified to me.
  - pitaj 7y ago
    I am the grandparent. I should have excluded trademark when I referred to IP but let me make it completely clear. By IP I am referring to copyright and patents.
    - 7y ago

gfodor 7y ago

This post lacks counterfactual reasoning. The question around IP law isn't if it's possible for creative work to be created without it, which is obviously true, but what creative works would be created (and what creative works would not be created) if IP law didn't exist. Is your claim that the set of creative works we have today would exist in full without IP law? Because that is a bold claim, and rather easily refutable through any single example where a company's primary competitive advantage hinges upon IP rights. Potential examples abound. You can argue that the tradeoffs in IP law are not good tradeoffs. But your post seems to think that there would be no tradeoff -- that simply we'd get all the benefits conferred to society (in the form of creative works), with none of the downsides, if we eliminated IP protections. The burden of proof is on you for that one, since I'm sure if you surveyed any company relying upon IP protections in any non-trivial way, they'd indicate that capital would have been allocated elsewhere if not for those protections.

sieabahlpark 7y ago
I'm glad someone has said this, it's one thing to want the IP law altered but to assume that nothing would change if IP law didn't exist seems naive.
pitaj 7y ago
> The question around IP law isn't if it's possible for creative work to be created without it, which is obviously true, but what creative works would be created (and what creative works would not be created) if IP law didn't exist. Those are bad questions, and unanswerable on all accounts. They also don't help us because then we have to compare the subjective values of creations to pick which is better, which is impossible since it varies person-to-person. One question we could ask is "How much money flows from a consumers to creators under both systems?" That question is still hard to answer, but at least the answer would have meaning. > Is your claim that the set of creative works we have today would exist in full without IP law? I don't claim that everything would be the same without IP laws. However, I certainly think it would be better if they didn't exist. > rather easily refutable through any single example where a company's primary competitive advantage hinges upon IP rights. Potential examples abound. It doesn't really matter but I am curious what companies you're referring to that aren't acting as parasitic rent-seeking middlemen. > You can argue that the tradeoffs in IP law are not good tradeoffs. But your post seems to think that there would be no tradeoff -- that simply we'd get all the benefits conferred to society (in the form of creative works), with none of the downsides, if we eliminated IP protections. I don't see any evidence that lifting IP protections will result in a decrease in quantity or quality of creative works as a whole. > The burden of proof is on you for that one, since I'm sure if you surveyed any company relying upon IP protections in any non-trivial way, they'd indicate that capital would have been allocated elsewhere if not for those protections. Let's make it clear what you're advocating for: continued state action that benefits a minority of the population at the expense of consumers by providing the members of that minority with an artificially enforced monopoly on information. Your argument is the status quo fallacy. Just because something currently exists, does not mean I have the burden of proof. In fact, it is you who must prove that IP is beneficial. I cannot prove a negative (that IP is not necessary or beneficial) and asking me to do so is irrational. That's like asking abolitionists to prove that slavery isn't necessary for the economy. (Sorry for the inflammatory example but it's what came to mind)

calimac 7y ago

The Inbalance of the current structure was established affectively by Disney and the movie music entertainment lawyers of Hollywood destroyed any semblance of reason. It must be restructured to compensate creators and allow free information or better said democracy of knowledge.

logfromblammo 7y ago

Kill copyright. Curtail patent. Keep trademark. In the absence of government-enforced monopoly, I think the next-best alternative for creatives would be to cartelize, trading new content for subscription fees covering a range of convenience services related to creative content, such as a recommendations engine, discoverability, favorites library, notifications, artist-specific storefronts, &c. Pay $10/month or $100/year to the cartel, and from that, the cartel pays its participating artists a guaranteed stipend for living expenses, bonuses for each new work added to the cartel's library, a bonus for each work that meets a positive audience-review threshold, a bonus for each work that meets a positive peer-review threshold, and jackpot awards for works deemed particularly notable by peers and patrons. The cartel spends heavily on advertising and promotion, to make new art be perceived as worth the cost of patronage, and portray patronage to the cartel as cool and fashionable. Paying patrons would get first shot at premium sales, such as concert tickets in favorable locations, or the opportunity to buy the original artwork or significant artifacts of the creation process. So you might, through your account with the arts cartel, find a new band whose sound you like, add them to your personal favorites library, be notified that they are playing live near you in October, get pre-sale tickets for the front rows of seats, and order a patron-exclusive band t-shirt to wear when you go. Then you download their newest tracks, and maybe decide they're worth $X to you, so you hit the "tip" button on your app and pay the cartel $Y so that they pay Z% of that directly to the artists. Later, you might get the opportunity to buy the actual hair net that Leadvocal Rockstar wore at the concert in a patron-exclusive auction. Meanwhile, your uncool non-patron friends are stuck listening to Top-40 format radio stations, because it's the most reliable curated content outside the arts cartel and the soulless corporate culture-for-consumption factories. Disney has proven that a giant aggregation of art-producers can sustain itself on almost pure self-promotion. Disney is a humongous self-reinforcing advertisement for itself, carrying multiple viable brands, each targeting different audience demographics. Disney could certainly survive loss of copyright protection, but they would definitely make less money without it, and may have trouble adapting to the new cash flows due to sheer hugeness.

mdszy 7y ago

Tell that to all sorts of companies who make billions of dollars off IP Remember that IP isn't just music and movies and digital data that you as random Joe or Jane Consumer want. It includes trade secrets, design patents, etc. You probably don't give a damn about the IP of a tissue mill that includes production data and information about how they run their machines to get a perfect roll of toilet paper every time, but the companies I work with give a lot of a damn about that and have no desire to share that information with anyone ever and hold onto that IP like their life depends on it (because it very well might) You have to remember that "IP" isn't just stuff that you might want. You have to look past your own nose a little.

Aloha 7y ago

I see no reason Intellectual Property shouldn't exist, it however shouldn't extend indefinitely, problem is - it basically now extends well beyond the time it should, and casts a huge net over stuff that has little to no commercial value, and no obvious ownership.

dwild 7y ago

> There are many many ways to monetize creation including but not limited to subscription, donation, live shows, advertisement, and commission. But then it would be legal to duplicate it and thus you can remove paid subscription and paid live shows from your possibilities. What's remains is ads/commission that you do block (the internet never forget [0]). Donations then should be the only way to make content? That seems quite bad... [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20205076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20205076

scarface74 7y ago

So should software developers do “live shows” of their coding or depend on the kindness of others? As far as how well advertising works for content, aren’t we seeing enough issues with that now between ad ridden sites and pay to win games?

MaxBarraclough 7y ago

> "Intellectual property" is fundamentally different from classical property because information is not an exclusive good. If I hold an apple, you cannot hold the same apple, but we can both hold a digital copy with the same information. All concepts of ownership are human constructs. We have copyright because of its utility, not for some analogy to conventional ownership in law. > There are many many ways to monetize creation including but not limited to subscription, donation, live shows, advertisement, and commission. I don't see anyone making high-budget movies under any revenue models other than as-a-product and as-a-service, both of which fail in the absence of copyright. > There is no evidence that intellectual property is necessary for innovation or creative endeavors. Given that whole industries are based on copyright, I rather think the onus is on you to make the case that getting rid of it wouldn't be ruinous.

paggle 7y ago

Forms of “ownership” are human created incentives towards particular behaviors. Land ownership incentivizes investment and reduces territorial violence. Child custody is a form of ownership that promotes family stability. The purpose of intellectual ownership in the US is explicitly to “promote the Useful Arts.” There is not supposed to be any theoretical justification for it, only empirical.