5 ms·

> And yet, they persist (and in the modern era, proliferate) because it's generally agreed society derives benefit from paying people for their purely-idea crea

• shadowgovt 7y ago
  > The existence of laws doesn't indicate the mood of society. But if laws are proliferating and regularizing instead of standing still or being abolished, and one assumes that elected representatives are acting on the will of the people, it probably does. There's lots of controversy over how to improve copyright / patent law, but not very many people in governments in the EU, US, China, Japan, Australia, &c are talking seriously about just burning the whole copyright / patent system to the ground. At least a subset of the countries in the groups listed are generally understood to have representative governments.
  • JadeNB 7y ago
    > one assumes that elected representatives are acting on the will of the people Yeah, that's the assumption I take issue with.
  • Retric 7y ago
    Representative governments are well known for supporting powerful groups over the collective benefit of society. Just look at any of those countries tax codes and you will find a multitude of special exceptions. Patents are of limited duration because the tradeoffs of unlimited patents are so horrific. If we accept a billion dollar drug must enter the public domain, clearly copyright should also be limited just as it was proposed in the US constitution. However, because a tiny minority has a huge benefit and society does not really notice the difference you get the modern mess of unending copyright.
    • shadowgovt 7y ago
      "A tiny minority has a huge benefit and society does not really notice the difference" seems like a utilitarian argument that the system is working as intended; there is net positive benefit.
      • JadeNB 7y ago
        > "A tiny minority has a huge benefit and society does not really notice the difference" seems like a utilitarian argument that the system is working as intended; there is net positive benefit. If tiny minority + 'society' is the entirety of the system, then that's true, but there are also plenty of players who lose out due to restrictive IP regimes—and it's hard to quantify the extent of those losses. (Whether or not the benefits they would reap from looser IP are appropriate or fair is beside the question for utilitarian computations.)
      • Retric 7y ago
        If it costs 350 million people 1 cent to hand me 1 million dollars they don’t notice, yet that’s a net loss. Critically, even when you include those who benefit it’s still a loss.
        • shadowgovt 7y ago
          Only if you consider money completely fungible and use money as your utility function for determining loss here. You haven't diminished the ability for 350 million people to do things, practically, by shaving 1 cent off of them. But adding the ability a million dollars provides one individual to do something cool with 1 million they couldn't do before has increased the overall capabilities of everyone. In essence, you've just described Kickstarter's business model.
          • Retric 7y ago
            You’re forgetting just how many organizations all do this, it’s adding up to a significant chunk of global GDP. It’s got real long term consequences. Basically, even if individual bacteria are unnoticed enough of them can kill you.
    • shawnz 7y ago
      > Patents are of limited duration because the tradeoffs of unlimited patents are so horrific. What would be the point of a patent system with unlimited duration? If we wanted that, we could just have companies not reveal their inventions in the first place
• s1artibartfast 7y ago
  I generally agree that society benefits from IP. I think IP is required to monitize valuable ideaS, and monitzation leads to social availability. On the personal level, I would not like it if publishers could freely print the works of new authors, or engineering solutions I spend years on could be copy and pasted. Some people prefer Creative Commons, and they are free to publish their work that way. Others need or want financial compensation.
  • JadeNB 7y ago
    > I generally agree that society benefits from IP. I certainly didn't mean to say that no-one agrees with it, but your personal agreement doesn't evince the general agreement that shadowgovt (an interesting username, in this context …) suggested. To be fair, neither does my skepticism provide any evidence against it.
    • s1artibartfast 7y ago
      I think we can align on the lack of evidence presented. There is also the question on what agreed to means in this sense. In terms of public opinion, it would be interesting to know what studies have been done. I imagine if you would get broad support for an author copyrighting a book, and less on patenting a pre-existing genetic sequence. As another unsubstantiated claim, I think if you sat down with the general public and the criteria for patents, they would mostly agree. The challenge has to do with implementing them and the legal process around them. If a crappy patent is issued to large corporation, it is incredibly expensive to challenge them.
• fwip 7y ago
  Jefferson's rich friends.