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The whole present state of intellectual property law seems fucked. We need some kind of intellectual property protection, since so much work is all just bits an
by 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
The whole present state of intellectual property law seems fucked. We need some kind of intellectual property protection, since so much work is all just bits and bytes these days. But we really don't seem to have gotten it right yet.
Side rant: "intellectual property" is a terrible name for it. The regulations are about copying implementations of ideas, rather then the ideas themselves. Regulating usage of an idea is less self evidently good.
- matheusmoreira 6y ago> We need some kind of intellectual property protection, since so much work is all just bits and bytes these days. It's precisely because everything is bits and bytes that intellectual property is absurd. All data is fundamentally just big numbers. We can even calculate how big these numbers are: decimal_digits = ceil(bits * log10(2)) For example, a 20 kiB picture is a number with 49,321 decimal digits. Intellectual property is an attempt to limit people's ability to know and tell each other these numbers. Certain numbers have been declared illegal.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoI don't think it makes IP fundamentally absurd. Amazon shouldn't be able to copy the big new Disney movie and sell it itself, cutting Disney out, for example. Even if they convert it from .mp4 to .mkv format or something making it a brand new number. That movie is "just" a big number, yes, but we're "just" meat and everything's "just" a big wave function and at some point we have to decide that higher level concepts are the more useful domain to work in.