4 ms·

It's funny as workers get caught up in notions of 'individual freedom', which they see as a benefit, but don't realize that systematically what this favours is

by jariel 6y ago

It's funny as workers get caught up in notions of 'individual freedom', which they see as a benefit, but don't realize that systematically what this favours is simply power. A company with 100x the resources of another, never needs to worry about IP or innovating, because it just plucks off other people's work, integrates into it's own machine and receives the market surpluses, risk free. So yes - by getting tons of young people to drink the koolaid 'work hard for startups' knowing the surpluses, if any, will largely be concentrated in the hands of literally 5-10 behemoths, the Valley has played a neat trick. IP rules favour the little guy: it's how they can keep their innovation by being taken from much larger companies. IP filed by large corps is often protective in nature, so as to protect themselves from trolls and obvious copy-cats.

redis_mlc 6y ago
You're confusing, perhaps deliberately, employee mobility rights in California with company IP. Thus your post makes no sense, in the English language at least.
centimeter 6y ago
> IP rules favour the little guy This is one of the most absurd and backwards claims I've seen on this site. Large companies are members of patent pools that prevent them from being sued by other members, whereas small companies without a large IP portfolio can't do anything without inadvertently violating someone's patent.
- jariel 6y ago
  You're raising a secondary IP issue to a concern much larger than it actually is, causing you to misinterpret the situation. IP is one of the very few areas wherein smaller companies can have any hope of leverage over larger ones. That small companies are blocked from some other patents is an issue, but a lesser one - and it applies to big and small alike. "whereas small companies without a large IP portfolio can't do anything without inadvertently violating someone's patent." - is plainly false. Obviously, companies continue to innovate. Large companies have much more to protect, and far from 'being safe' - IP laws make them more risk averse if anything because they put a lot more at risk than smaller one's. Google has outright banned their employees from even downloading MongoDB etc. due to lack of clarity over licensing. Without IP protections, Google wouldn't care one bit what they did. Large companies play against each other mostly in the domain of competition, without IP laws they would step on every smaller company like little ants, without any concern.
  - jlokier 6y ago
    > IP is one of the very few areas wherein smaller companies can have any hope of leverage over larger ones. Leverage over another isn't the only way to compete. If there was no IP, smaller companies would have alternatives such as blatantly copying the larger companies' better product features, while being nimbler to innovate with those ideas, and to blend features from different companies into a new product. Not every small company would be good at that. But some would. Some smaller companies would have more ability to out-innovate incumbents. Of course that already happens, but it could happen more freely without IP. The smaller companies would still have the problem of being noticed, selling their products, and getting investor interest (which I'm told IP helps with), but those problems aren't new.
- pnw_hazor 6y ago
  The trick for small companies is to have a few good patents and leverage the profit/revenue imbalance with BigCo. When BigCo comes calling with their stack of patents demanding a license or profit share, you break out your few key patents and demand one back from them. BigCo has a lot more to lose compared to SmallCo. SmallCo has little or no profit and little revenue so BigCo gets no money from them for patent infringement. BigCo has a bunch of money. If SmallCo has good patents BigCo will go away or make SmallCo a deal to avoid millions of dollars in damages or license fees BigCo would owe SmallCo for infringement. IP litigators will take such cases on contingency. If you don't have good IP you are a commodity.
agency 6y ago
So it would be better for these employees if they were barred from going to work for Apple?
konjin 6y ago
That sounds like something someone who has never been taken to court over IP rights would say. I have, and it cost us $10k to get told "you're screwed." by the lawyer that was suggested by friends as one of the better ones for startups.
- jariel 6y ago
  Without IP laws, you would be even more screwed. By virtue of your existence, you would be there as little fish literally to be eaten by larger one's. For every time a large company trolls a smaller one, there are 100 times one company decides not to infringe on some other work. For example, I work with a hardware company that has patents. We freely send our products to larger competitors. Why? Because they know we have good IP, and were they to copy our approach, it would be a straightforward infringement on us, and it would risk their entire business. Admittedly, we are luckily that infringement in this case would be fairly clear because that's not always the case.
  - konjin 6y ago
    There are 100 companies that decide to infringe on your patents in China anyway. This way we get the worst of all possible worlds. Had we been more desperate and not using other peoples money we would have started negotiating with car bombs as our Eastern European engineer suggested.
  - unishark 6y ago
    So your company engages in sales practices that would be foolish without IP. That doesn't prove it is the only way to sell, or that it true for all fields. For that matter, why are the big fish able to continually have so much margin in the first place except for patents? Microsoft has made how many billions over control of a narrow programming layer to run other tasks in a loop that's been covered in sophomore year of college since at least the 80s? Competition should destroy their advantages once the market gets so big and mature. Instead such companies capture a market while it's still small, then pivot from hiring engineers to hiring lawyers. Seems to me that certain industries like software are able to have so much startups and innovation because the legal system is just less effective at capturing and crippling them, despite heroic efforts.
shalmanese 6y ago
> A company with 100x the resources of another, never needs to worry about IP or innovating, because it just plucks off other people's work, integrates into it's own machine and receives the market surpluses, risk free. Which is why we're all typing this on DEC machines running OS/2 on AOL internet with 3Com modems.
- jariel 6y ago
  Funny you have to pick all 30 year old examples. We have been running almost entirely Windows and Mac for over 20 years (at least in consumer land). We have been running mostly Intel and nVidia for over 20 years. We have been running mostly Chrome and maybe 2 others for 10 years. We have 1 comprehensive social network (FB/Insta) for over 10 years. We have 3/4 major internet providers and 4 wireless carriers - forever. We have essentially 1 Search Engine. We have 2 smartphone platforms for over 12 years. ... when there are 'new markets to be exploited' or a fundamental shift in a market (ie feature phones to smartphones) - new entrants have a chance, but outside of that, they don't as incumbents win relatively easily unless they get lazy. Each of the major players above has been able to leverage their market power into domination. IP is one of the few vectors of power for smaller companies (often the only vector) that stop these behemoths from wiping them out. Sadly, depending on the scenario, there are often few material IP protections to be had.
  - twblalock 6y ago
    Of course, 20 years ago there were no smartphone platforms at all, no social networks, Internet Explorer was the dominant browser, Google was an upstart competing with search "portals" like Yahoo, a 3dfx Voodoo card was the hot thing to have, Apple was nearly dead, and Amazon was a place to buy books and CDs. At the time people thought Microsoft was so dominant that most of the innovations of the past 20 years could not have happened, because Microsoft was a behemoth that would simply take over any competitors. But they lost on search, phones, browsers, etc. I don't really see how it's different this time around. There is currently no company as dominant over the entire industry as Microsoft was in 2000, or as dominant as IBM was in 1980.

by jariel 6y ago

redis_mlc 6y ago

You're confusing, perhaps deliberately, employee mobility rights in California with company IP. Thus your post makes no sense, in the English language at least.

centimeter 6y ago

> IP rules favour the little guy This is one of the most absurd and backwards claims I've seen on this site. Large companies are members of patent pools that prevent them from being sued by other members, whereas small companies without a large IP portfolio can't do anything without inadvertently violating someone's patent.

jariel 6y ago
You're raising a secondary IP issue to a concern much larger than it actually is, causing you to misinterpret the situation. IP is one of the very few areas wherein smaller companies can have any hope of leverage over larger ones. That small companies are blocked from some other patents is an issue, but a lesser one - and it applies to big and small alike. "whereas small companies without a large IP portfolio can't do anything without inadvertently violating someone's patent." - is plainly false. Obviously, companies continue to innovate. Large companies have much more to protect, and far from 'being safe' - IP laws make them more risk averse if anything because they put a lot more at risk than smaller one's. Google has outright banned their employees from even downloading MongoDB etc. due to lack of clarity over licensing. Without IP protections, Google wouldn't care one bit what they did. Large companies play against each other mostly in the domain of competition, without IP laws they would step on every smaller company like little ants, without any concern.
- jlokier 6y ago
  > IP is one of the very few areas wherein smaller companies can have any hope of leverage over larger ones. Leverage over another isn't the only way to compete. If there was no IP, smaller companies would have alternatives such as blatantly copying the larger companies' better product features, while being nimbler to innovate with those ideas, and to blend features from different companies into a new product. Not every small company would be good at that. But some would. Some smaller companies would have more ability to out-innovate incumbents. Of course that already happens, but it could happen more freely without IP. The smaller companies would still have the problem of being noticed, selling their products, and getting investor interest (which I'm told IP helps with), but those problems aren't new.
pnw_hazor 6y ago
The trick for small companies is to have a few good patents and leverage the profit/revenue imbalance with BigCo. When BigCo comes calling with their stack of patents demanding a license or profit share, you break out your few key patents and demand one back from them. BigCo has a lot more to lose compared to SmallCo. SmallCo has little or no profit and little revenue so BigCo gets no money from them for patent infringement. BigCo has a bunch of money. If SmallCo has good patents BigCo will go away or make SmallCo a deal to avoid millions of dollars in damages or license fees BigCo would owe SmallCo for infringement. IP litigators will take such cases on contingency. If you don't have good IP you are a commodity.

agency 6y ago

So it would be better for these employees if they were barred from going to work for Apple?

konjin 6y ago

That sounds like something someone who has never been taken to court over IP rights would say. I have, and it cost us $10k to get told "you're screwed." by the lawyer that was suggested by friends as one of the better ones for startups.

jariel 6y ago
Without IP laws, you would be even more screwed. By virtue of your existence, you would be there as little fish literally to be eaten by larger one's. For every time a large company trolls a smaller one, there are 100 times one company decides not to infringe on some other work. For example, I work with a hardware company that has patents. We freely send our products to larger competitors. Why? Because they know we have good IP, and were they to copy our approach, it would be a straightforward infringement on us, and it would risk their entire business. Admittedly, we are luckily that infringement in this case would be fairly clear because that's not always the case.
- konjin 6y ago
  There are 100 companies that decide to infringe on your patents in China anyway. This way we get the worst of all possible worlds. Had we been more desperate and not using other peoples money we would have started negotiating with car bombs as our Eastern European engineer suggested.
- unishark 6y ago
  So your company engages in sales practices that would be foolish without IP. That doesn't prove it is the only way to sell, or that it true for all fields. For that matter, why are the big fish able to continually have so much margin in the first place except for patents? Microsoft has made how many billions over control of a narrow programming layer to run other tasks in a loop that's been covered in sophomore year of college since at least the 80s? Competition should destroy their advantages once the market gets so big and mature. Instead such companies capture a market while it's still small, then pivot from hiring engineers to hiring lawyers. Seems to me that certain industries like software are able to have so much startups and innovation because the legal system is just less effective at capturing and crippling them, despite heroic efforts.

shalmanese 6y ago

> A company with 100x the resources of another, never needs to worry about IP or innovating, because it just plucks off other people's work, integrates into it's own machine and receives the market surpluses, risk free. Which is why we're all typing this on DEC machines running OS/2 on AOL internet with 3Com modems.

jariel 6y ago
Funny you have to pick all 30 year old examples. We have been running almost entirely Windows and Mac for over 20 years (at least in consumer land). We have been running mostly Intel and nVidia for over 20 years. We have been running mostly Chrome and maybe 2 others for 10 years. We have 1 comprehensive social network (FB/Insta) for over 10 years. We have 3/4 major internet providers and 4 wireless carriers - forever. We have essentially 1 Search Engine. We have 2 smartphone platforms for over 12 years. ... when there are 'new markets to be exploited' or a fundamental shift in a market (ie feature phones to smartphones) - new entrants have a chance, but outside of that, they don't as incumbents win relatively easily unless they get lazy. Each of the major players above has been able to leverage their market power into domination. IP is one of the few vectors of power for smaller companies (often the only vector) that stop these behemoths from wiping them out. Sadly, depending on the scenario, there are often few material IP protections to be had.
- twblalock 6y ago
  Of course, 20 years ago there were no smartphone platforms at all, no social networks, Internet Explorer was the dominant browser, Google was an upstart competing with search "portals" like Yahoo, a 3dfx Voodoo card was the hot thing to have, Apple was nearly dead, and Amazon was a place to buy books and CDs. At the time people thought Microsoft was so dominant that most of the innovations of the past 20 years could not have happened, because Microsoft was a behemoth that would simply take over any competitors. But they lost on search, phones, browsers, etc. I don't really see how it's different this time around. There is currently no company as dominant over the entire industry as Microsoft was in 2000, or as dominant as IBM was in 1980.