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With IP monpolized and enforced by the neo-colonial global North corporatocracy or empire, thanks to TRIPS [1] - "Meanwhile, the educational, information and

• beervirus 6y ago
  Every (or almost every?) industrialized nation already had a patent system. The TRIPS agreement just standardized some aspects of those disparate systems across countries.
  • bergstromm466 6y ago
    "Of all the forms of artificial property and legal privilege in existence, the one most indispensable to corporate power in today's economy is probably "intellectual property. A large portion of the price of most goods and services consists of embedded rents on “intellectual property.” Tom Peters, in The Tom Peters Seminar, argued that the cost of materials probably accounted for some $60 of the total price of his new Minolta camera, and that he paid “the rest, about $640, for its intellect....” He went on to celebrate the portion of economic value made up of “intellect” and “imagination.”33 Whether Peters' estimate is typical for the portion of the price of manufactured goods made up of rents on IP is doubtful. But in an economy with no property rights in software and product design, with competition unrestricted by "intellectual property" claims of any kind, whatever portion of a product's price was made up of rent on the ownership of designs or ideas—as opposed to labor and materials—would evaporate overnight. IP is a major legal support to oligopoly, since so many cartels were stabilized by the exchange or pooling of patents between the major players in various industries (e.g. G.E. And Westinghouse in home appliances, the Bell Patent Association as the basis for AT&T, RCA as a patent pooling arrangement for the major radio producers, etc.). If IP were abolished, there would be no legal barrier against many small companies producing competing modular components or accessories for the same platform, or even big companies producing modular components designed for interoperability with other companies products. That means that IP is an important legal bulwark not only for planned obsolescence, but also for a business model based on selling cheap platforms and then charging an enormous markup to a captive market for accessories. If you've ever remarked on how expensive toner cartridges or glucometer testing strips are, you can thank “intellectual property” for it. It's odd that the so-called “Free Trade Agreements” promoted by so many professed “free traders” focus so disproportionately on provisions for stricter enforcement of patents and copyrights. IP plays exactly the same protectionist role for global corporations that tariffs did for the old national industrial economies. Patents and copyrights are barriers, not to the movement of physical goods, but to the diffusion of technique and technology. The one, as much as the other, constitutes a monopoly of productive capability. “Intellectual property” enables the transnational corporation to benefit from the moral equivalent of tariff barriers, regardless of where it is situated. In so doing, it breaks the old link between geography and protectionism. With an American tariff on a particular kind of good, the corporations producing that good have a monopoly on it only within the American market. With the “tariff” provided by a patent on the industrial technique for producing that good, the same corporations have an identical monopoly in every single country in the world that adheres to the international patent regime. “Intellectual property,” just as much as the tariff, is a form of protectionism in that it restricts the right to produce a given good for a particular market area to a privileged class of firms." Source: http://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Political-Economy-of-Waste.pdf http://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Political-Economy... -- Your argument that patent systems already existed does nothing to critique the systems, or the dynamics of the systems, themselves. Instead of accepting things on face value or because an authority has made a claim, I am trying instead to find out the story of how it came to be. I am not arguing that we should not have any system at all. I strongly disagree however that the existing systems are as harmless as you make them out to be. When you say it "just standardized some aspects" it brushes under the rug any nuance of the underlying mechanics of these systems.
    • beervirus 6y ago
      No matter what the topic is, if you focus only on the negatives and pretend the positives don't exist, it's gonna sound bad. Reasonable people can argue about whether the negatives outweigh the positives, but reasonable people don't pretend that that there just aren't any positives.
      • bergstromm466 6y ago
        > pretend the positives don't exist Critiquing something is not denying positives. Please point out where I said that? That is not my intention. I would say that critiquing without providing an alternative is about sharing grief [1], than it is about discussing, planning and creating alternatives. I think you've given me the opportunity to reflect on my approach and message. I am for systemic evolution and integration: technology shapes us, and we shape technology, it's a spiral. Promoting intellectual property rights while at the same time talking about 'free markets' is one of the most harmful and backward Doublespeak going on in today's system I think. The systemic components and dynamics that are part of the intellectual property systems are ripe for evolution. I believe we are living with a pre-21st century systemic reality that doesn't account for the new opportunities available to us due to digital technology. The reality is that there is a world out there with people who are suffering at the bottom of the corporate pyramids (the Precariat, e.g. gig workers - who have no job security, no benefits, and not many prospects of a peaceful retirement). Then there are also the hundreds of millions suffering in so called 'developing' countries whose resources are plundered and whose governments compete for industrial-production contracts with our corporatocracy [2][3], creating continuous race-to-the-bottom dynamics that squash workers' rights and create environmental catastrophes. Commons-based peer production integrates our new digital technology abilities, and it has to be our future. Firm/corporate production is wasteful and destructive. Imagine if all phones and gadgets were modular, including the software inside. Instead our gadgets today become slow non-backwards compatible bricks because of perceived obsolescence. I can do without Siri, or the gaming capabilities of the latest flagship phone... or multitasking, or whatever other corporate feature I do not have a choice whether to run or not. Because of the monopoly created by the idea of exclusive intellectual property (and the systems constructed to support it), many of these useful ideas and technologies lie locked up inside corporate databases, unexplored and unused. What a waste. What a cosmic joke and tyranny. My belief is that by using technologies like Ceptr and MetaCurrency's Holochain, we can be in a large scale transition to Commons-based peer production, where we might be able to reverse climate change in just a few years. The technologies that can save us are here today, yet the intellectual property regime keeps them artificially scarce. The big constraint underneath all of this, though, is our dogmatic ideas around wealth and money: 1. The current political economy is based on a false idea of material abundance. We call it pseudo-abundance. It is based on a commitment to permanent growth, the infinite accumulation of capital and debt-driven dynamics through compound interest. This is unsustainable, of course, because infinite growth is logically and physically impossible in any physically constrained, finite system. 2. The current political economy is based on a false idea of “immaterial scarcity.” It believes that an exaggerated set of intellectual property monopolies—for copyrights, trademarks and patents—should restrain the sharing of scientific, social and economic innovations. Hence the system discourages human cooperation, excludes many people from benefiting from innovation and slows the collective learning of humanity. In an age of grave global challenges, the political economy keeps many practical alternatives sequestered behind private firewalls or unfunded if they cannot generate adequate profits. So my hope is that I can continue dreaming and imagining a world where humans have a non-violent and harmonious relationship with the Great Mother, where we’ve moved to a closed loop resource economy, where all outputs can become new inputs, where nothing is wasted. A world where everything is modular and where the scarcity of our intellectual property systems have become inverted and lead to a rich Copyleft world instead, where intelligence is pushed to the edges. [1] https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/478/the-geography-of-sorrow https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/478/the-geography-of-s... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btF6nKHo2i0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btF6nKHo2i0 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaGp5_Sfbss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaGp5_Sfbss