5 ms·

The first step in dealing with these issues, is to have a serious discussion about the term "intellectual property", and whether or not an idea can indeed be "p

The first step in dealing with these issues, is to have a serious discussion about the term "intellectual property", and whether or not an idea can indeed be "property". I think a very large part of the problem, is that our society has somehow come to the conclusion that yes, they can be. I strongly disagree. I think a better way to look at IP, is as an "intellectual lease". When you have an idea, as the person or group who originally conceived of it, you are presumably in the best position to make use of it. You can therefore "lease" from society, the right to use it exclusively for a short, well defined period of time. At the end of that term, your lease expires. At no point do you "own" the idea, because as soon as you release it into the world, it is already in the minds of many, some of which may be able to put it to better use than you, or to improve it faster than you. This has several ramifications, including ones that effect creative works too. I posted a few long comments recently about copyright that expresses my view, but to summarise - creative works should have a limited window during which the author or creator can be the exclusive seller of the work (eg copyright should be about restricting who can profit, rather than who can copy). After that time, anybody is free to sell as well. This has many benefits. I used Harry Potter as the example last time as it is well know. Harry Potter now is known by almost everybody. We all know the story, we know the characters. JK has made a ton of money - more money imo, than any one author deserves, but that aside. HP is part of our collective humans story now. If I want to make a mobile game about it, or write a play about it, or adapt it for a new medium, or translate it - why should I still owe the original author royalties when I could reproduce the plot from memory? Again, I use the example of ancient Greece, and the way in which aural story telling was paranount. Stories spread, adapted, becamr part of society. The ones that survived that we have written down are simply one version that would have been told aurally at one point in time. The way that we insist that works and derivative works be set in stone in order to maintain profit is prioritising profit over the joy that is the spreading and adapting of stories that has been central to most human cultures since the beginning.

ArchD 6y ago
All reasonable points. But except in an ideal world, I don't see how people who shape and enforce the laws are incentivized to realize them. That intellectual property is "out of control" is perhaps but part of a bigger picture that the government is dysfunctional and out-of-control. You can talk about how things should be until the cows come home, but at the end of the day, the big question is how do you realize your ideas in the world.
- defnotashton2 6y ago
  This. The patent system has long been touted to help the little man, but today it's used by people who have legal fee money to bully everyone else. But why or how would this change given the political structure in the states or anywhere for that matter. This is a byproduct of centralizing vertical power which is the very nature of most modern governments and their respective cultures. A distributed horizontally cut set of powers would be better and I think with the states, states rights argument support this.
unishark 6y ago
> At no point do you "own" the idea, because as soon as you release it into the world, it is already in the minds of many, some of which may be able to put it to better use than you, or to improve it faster than you. When it comes to patents, even if you don't share the idea, others will come up with it independently. And the patent system is perfectly fine if you patent something then sit on the idea for 20 years and never allow it or any derived products be made or used.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  > And the patent system is perfectly fine if you patent something then sit on the idea for 20 years and never allow it or any derived products be made or used. This should be banned either way by mandatory licensing requirements under FRAND terms as part of the patent grant, especially if the holder does not actively use the patent. Too much progress in society/technology is blocked because companies are sitting on patents and not licensing them.
- Thorentis 6y ago
  Also true, and another reason why the patent system is broken.
jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
This is already how copyright works, so I am not sure what you are proposing. A reduction of time? How much?
- Thorentis 6y ago
  No, copyright restricts copying and derivative works without royalties. As I said in my comment, I propose the restriction only be on profiting from work, and for a much shorter period of time than currently (70 years for creative works? Absurd. 10 years is far more appropriate).
  - slx26 6y ago
    I would actually go even further and say that the only restriction we should eventually need is crediting the original author. Potential individual profit (as in economic profit) makes sense in the current world where the distribution of resources is terrible and you want to be able to capitalize on your ideas. But ideally, if that's not an issue in the future, all you could reasonably want is "acknowledgement for your contributions". Even there the line is hard to draw, but I find myself more and more aligned with this perspective lately. Might still be too egocentric, though, and maybe not even "acknowledgement" is necessary. Maybe if acknowledgement was culturally more widespread even a law like this wouldn't make sense to me.
    - jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
      That is a vacuous statement. Yes, profit is only a problem if money is a problem. But given money is still used by society (and will be used for decades), it is pretty obvious you cannot remove profit. Do it, and only rich people will be able to create. No Harry Potter for us.
      - slx26 6y ago
        Well, I feel your reply is somewhat uncharitable. I mean, I said "ideally", and I didn't talk about money disappearing, only about, as you expressed, "money [not] being a problem". Which you might still consider naive, fair enough, but that's another story. And honestly, even if in practice it makes no immediate difference, telling apart the "moral" issues and the practical ones is relevant for analysis and defining the direction we want to move towards.
ozim 6y ago
Yeah great but when you put JK and HP stories as an example you trow out the window all those people whose works take decades to get popular. There is a lot more authors who struggle whole their life's. You should not change law based on exceptions.
- HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
  Making the distinction between a derivative work that makes money vs one that doesn't could be helpful in this case.
jariel 6y ago
Harry Potter would not have been written and published, and made into a global phenom without IP laws in the ballpark as they stand. There is zero chance the Potter films would have been made were the Studios not able to protect their distribution. There are other parties in the system, the content creators, who are pretty strongly affected by these rules - it's an equilibrium, you can get the same kind of output when you change the to empower one side.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  > Harry Potter would not have been written That's not clear at all. Many people create things for vanity purposes. And some people just like telling stories. > and published Printers published books with abandon before there was copyright. In fact, the motivation for copyright laws was to put a stop to that.
  - Thorentis 6y ago
    Yeah, the argument that creative works wouldn't have been created without current IP laws is rubbish. Almost the entirely of the Western literature cannon was written before our current IP laws. Even in Dicken's time, he was able to profit without obscene copyright laws, because back then publishers would simply purchase the manuscript from him (which would be his income) and then they would print and sell them. I find the notion that the number of times your book is read should be proportional to the income you make from it, to be entirely antithetical to the point of creativity and art. Doesn't matter whether your book is read by 1 person or by 1 million. You still put in the same amount of work. And, presumably, the higher quality the work, the more will read it. But not always. That's life. If a publisher thinks they can sell me or if you're an already famous and established author, publishers will buy your manuscripts for higher prices. If a publisher wants to enter into a royalties agreement then that is their own affair. We as a society should not be encouraging such arrangements - which is exactly what our copyright laws are designed to do.
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      That brings up the possibility of ad-supported writing - like we see with free TV, most of the internet, etc. Heck, I've often paid writers to write stuff for my business that I then give away for free.
reedwolf 6y ago
Without the right to exclusively profit from the final product, are pharmaceutical companies gonna invest all the resources and engage in all the bureaucracy-navigation it takes to develop a new drug?
- RNCTX 6y ago
  > Without the right to exclusively profit from the final product, are pharmaceutical companies gonna invest all the resources and engage in all the bureaucracy-navigation it takes to develop a new drug? Per recent congressional testimony, virtually all drugs are developed with NIH (federal) funding. So the first order of business in fixing this problem is dispelling the notion that there is such a thing as a "market" for pharmaceuticals. There is not. Government money is present quite literally from the very first step. Coincidentally, dispelling false notions of the existence of "free markets" is the first step to solving a lot of other economic problems as well. https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/02/01/rep-ocasio-cortez-and-where-drugs-come-from https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/02/01/re...
  - pclmulqdq 6y ago
    Virtually all drugs come out of an NIH-funded lab, but so do a huge number of other drugs and therapies that don't work. The vast majority of things that come out of research labs have no hope at making it past a phase 1 trial. The drug companies do a lot of R&D to validate the ideas of drug discovery teams and to test for side effects. They spend incredible amounts of money on this, much more than the labs that initially proposed the drug.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - bergstromm466 6y ago
      But that work isn’t only magically able to be done by corporations. If pharmaceutical corps like Gilead and others didn’t rake in billions per year and were taxed properly (i.e. no more rentier incomes), that same work could be done in the open by NIH and others. Why are people so keen on state granted monopolies (patents) when it can be done open source?
specialist 6y ago
Love the idea of intellectual leases. I now regard renewable leases as a cure-all for most of society's ills. That said... The point of intellectual property is to improve society, not enrich the owner of the IP. Note that I said "owner", not inventor or creator, who typically get screwed.
slim 6y ago
Why grant any exclusive rights to creator ? Why not let people remix freely and give back a standardized 20% to original creators ?

ArchD 6y ago

All reasonable points. But except in an ideal world, I don't see how people who shape and enforce the laws are incentivized to realize them. That intellectual property is "out of control" is perhaps but part of a bigger picture that the government is dysfunctional and out-of-control. You can talk about how things should be until the cows come home, but at the end of the day, the big question is how do you realize your ideas in the world.

defnotashton2 6y ago
This. The patent system has long been touted to help the little man, but today it's used by people who have legal fee money to bully everyone else. But why or how would this change given the political structure in the states or anywhere for that matter. This is a byproduct of centralizing vertical power which is the very nature of most modern governments and their respective cultures. A distributed horizontally cut set of powers would be better and I think with the states, states rights argument support this.

unishark 6y ago

> At no point do you "own" the idea, because as soon as you release it into the world, it is already in the minds of many, some of which may be able to put it to better use than you, or to improve it faster than you. When it comes to patents, even if you don't share the idea, others will come up with it independently. And the patent system is perfectly fine if you patent something then sit on the idea for 20 years and never allow it or any derived products be made or used.

mschuster91 6y ago
> And the patent system is perfectly fine if you patent something then sit on the idea for 20 years and never allow it or any derived products be made or used. This should be banned either way by mandatory licensing requirements under FRAND terms as part of the patent grant, especially if the holder does not actively use the patent. Too much progress in society/technology is blocked because companies are sitting on patents and not licensing them.
Thorentis 6y ago
Also true, and another reason why the patent system is broken.

jfkebwjsbx 6y ago

This is already how copyright works, so I am not sure what you are proposing. A reduction of time? How much?

Thorentis 6y ago
No, copyright restricts copying and derivative works without royalties. As I said in my comment, I propose the restriction only be on profiting from work, and for a much shorter period of time than currently (70 years for creative works? Absurd. 10 years is far more appropriate).
- slx26 6y ago
  I would actually go even further and say that the only restriction we should eventually need is crediting the original author. Potential individual profit (as in economic profit) makes sense in the current world where the distribution of resources is terrible and you want to be able to capitalize on your ideas. But ideally, if that's not an issue in the future, all you could reasonably want is "acknowledgement for your contributions". Even there the line is hard to draw, but I find myself more and more aligned with this perspective lately. Might still be too egocentric, though, and maybe not even "acknowledgement" is necessary. Maybe if acknowledgement was culturally more widespread even a law like this wouldn't make sense to me.
  - jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
    That is a vacuous statement. Yes, profit is only a problem if money is a problem. But given money is still used by society (and will be used for decades), it is pretty obvious you cannot remove profit. Do it, and only rich people will be able to create. No Harry Potter for us.
    - slx26 6y ago
      Well, I feel your reply is somewhat uncharitable. I mean, I said "ideally", and I didn't talk about money disappearing, only about, as you expressed, "money [not] being a problem". Which you might still consider naive, fair enough, but that's another story. And honestly, even if in practice it makes no immediate difference, telling apart the "moral" issues and the practical ones is relevant for analysis and defining the direction we want to move towards.

ozim 6y ago

Yeah great but when you put JK and HP stories as an example you trow out the window all those people whose works take decades to get popular. There is a lot more authors who struggle whole their life's. You should not change law based on exceptions.

HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
Making the distinction between a derivative work that makes money vs one that doesn't could be helpful in this case.

jariel 6y ago

Harry Potter would not have been written and published, and made into a global phenom without IP laws in the ballpark as they stand. There is zero chance the Potter films would have been made were the Studios not able to protect their distribution. There are other parties in the system, the content creators, who are pretty strongly affected by these rules - it's an equilibrium, you can get the same kind of output when you change the to empower one side.

WalterBright 6y ago
> Harry Potter would not have been written That's not clear at all. Many people create things for vanity purposes. And some people just like telling stories. > and published Printers published books with abandon before there was copyright. In fact, the motivation for copyright laws was to put a stop to that.
- Thorentis 6y ago
  Yeah, the argument that creative works wouldn't have been created without current IP laws is rubbish. Almost the entirely of the Western literature cannon was written before our current IP laws. Even in Dicken's time, he was able to profit without obscene copyright laws, because back then publishers would simply purchase the manuscript from him (which would be his income) and then they would print and sell them. I find the notion that the number of times your book is read should be proportional to the income you make from it, to be entirely antithetical to the point of creativity and art. Doesn't matter whether your book is read by 1 person or by 1 million. You still put in the same amount of work. And, presumably, the higher quality the work, the more will read it. But not always. That's life. If a publisher thinks they can sell me or if you're an already famous and established author, publishers will buy your manuscripts for higher prices. If a publisher wants to enter into a royalties agreement then that is their own affair. We as a society should not be encouraging such arrangements - which is exactly what our copyright laws are designed to do.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    That brings up the possibility of ad-supported writing - like we see with free TV, most of the internet, etc. Heck, I've often paid writers to write stuff for my business that I then give away for free.

reedwolf 6y ago

Without the right to exclusively profit from the final product, are pharmaceutical companies gonna invest all the resources and engage in all the bureaucracy-navigation it takes to develop a new drug?

RNCTX 6y ago
> Without the right to exclusively profit from the final product, are pharmaceutical companies gonna invest all the resources and engage in all the bureaucracy-navigation it takes to develop a new drug? Per recent congressional testimony, virtually all drugs are developed with NIH (federal) funding. So the first order of business in fixing this problem is dispelling the notion that there is such a thing as a "market" for pharmaceuticals. There is not. Government money is present quite literally from the very first step. Coincidentally, dispelling false notions of the existence of "free markets" is the first step to solving a lot of other economic problems as well. https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/02/01/rep-ocasio-cortez-and-where-drugs-come-from https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/02/01/re...
- pclmulqdq 6y ago
  Virtually all drugs come out of an NIH-funded lab, but so do a huge number of other drugs and therapies that don't work. The vast majority of things that come out of research labs have no hope at making it past a phase 1 trial. The drug companies do a lot of R&D to validate the ideas of drug discovery teams and to test for side effects. They spend incredible amounts of money on this, much more than the labs that initially proposed the drug.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - bergstromm466 6y ago
    But that work isn’t only magically able to be done by corporations. If pharmaceutical corps like Gilead and others didn’t rake in billions per year and were taxed properly (i.e. no more rentier incomes), that same work could be done in the open by NIH and others. Why are people so keen on state granted monopolies (patents) when it can be done open source?

specialist 6y ago

Love the idea of intellectual leases. I now regard renewable leases as a cure-all for most of society's ills. That said... The point of intellectual property is to improve society, not enrich the owner of the IP. Note that I said "owner", not inventor or creator, who typically get screwed.

slim 6y ago

Why grant any exclusive rights to creator ? Why not let people remix freely and give back a standardized 20% to original creators ?