"Part of me feels disconnected from this whole argument. I would download a car. I don’t feel bad and I don’t think anyone should for feeling that way" I see t

"Part of me feels disconnected from this whole argument. I would download a car. I don’t feel bad and I don’t think anyone should for feeling that way" I see this come up on HN from time to time. How would you feel if a large company made millions of dollars on your open source project, and never gave anything back in return? "Culture is free. If you didn’t want the world to know about it and use it you shouldn’t have shared your creation, knowledge, invention, or property with society by allowing them to legally acquire it." This has very dangerous implications. If we have no intellectual property rights, large companies could just wait until small startups came out with a good idea..and it could be ripped off and copied. It only pushes us towards a world that's controlled by a couple of large corporations and governments. "If I can figure out how my car’s self-driving system works without violating any of the car vendor’s computers, that is my right to do so in order to adapt the car to my needs and desires" We aren't talking about reverse-engineering a car that you buy (which is legal). We are talking about an employee exfiltrating source code and other proprietary documents to be used at a competing company. "Then they will clone the tech just like everyone else." Sure, but who wants to be the first person to market and spend billions of dollars on R&D when you can just clone it after some other company does all of the hard work for you? Another reason why we need IP laws is that innovation is actually stifled without them. China is a good example of this. I can't think of one thing innovative that came out of China in decades. Most are cheap (and many times worse) copies of technology from more innovative countries. It reminds me of the current state of new drugs. The majority of new drugs are created in the US and are then cloned and sold for a much cheaper cost to countries with socialized medicine...mostly because they don't have to do any of the expensive R&D/clinical trials to get the drug to market. "I would expect future cars to have always online functionality to enable self-driving functionality checks simply for road safety reasons and also to deter IP leakage via encrypted firmware and remotely validated automatic updates. It will be interesting to see if any kind of open source challenger will appear in such a future" This is where most software has gone in the last decade (from download and install a copy to SAAS), so it makes sense.