6 ms·

I think it is quite likely that we as a society would be better off without any kind of copyright or IP. This might prevent some of the parties doing huge upfr

• pojntfx 6y ago
  True. IMHO IP law is based on a moral and not a utilitarian basis, and as we know from almost all recent FLOSS projects especially in Cloud (Linux, Kubernetes, ...) IP is just a massive hindrance to productivity and has a net negative effect on the industry.
  • srtjstjsj 6y ago
    The US Constitution explicitly cites utilitarian goals in the Copyright Clause.
    • teddyh 6y ago
      True, but that motivation was based on assumptions which are no longer true. Things no longer take effort to copy, and information can flow across the world in an instant. There is no longer any need to encourage copyright in order to get better information from foreign countries.
    • pojntfx 6y ago
      Sure! But the US Constitution wasn't written in a time where software was a thing, right?
• kelnage 6y ago
  It’s not at all clear how you are comparing Linux to its closed competitors, but frankly, if that’s the best example you can pick, I’d suggest copyright is largely winning that battle. Yes, Linux has probably “won” in some markets (servers/IoT being the obvious ones), but there are plenty of markets where that is not even close to being true.
  • necheffa 6y ago
    > plenty Actually, just one, the desktop. In virtually every other market, Linux is either dominating or has a firm share.
    • the-dude 6y ago
      MS dominates the server side in corporations too.
      • prepend 6y ago
        I don’t think any more. With cloud, AWS, Azure, Google have more Linux server vms than windows. So maybe MS dominates the withering on prem data center world. But that’s smaller than cloud nowadays.
    • ChrisLomont 6y ago
      Phones, billions of devices running various embedded real-time os, gaming like Xbox and playstation, watches, smart TVs, medical devices, space systems, and many other places are not Linux dominated, and many of these have almost zero Linux presence.
      • patmorgan23 6y ago
        Xbox runs windows not Linux.
      • est31 6y ago
        > Phones For smartphones, Linux-based Android has the largest market share. It is linux dominated. For less smart phones, there are Linux based operating systems like KaiOS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS Linux based OSs having 87% market share in india: https://www.androidauthority.com/india-kaios-market-share-885349/ https://www.androidauthority.com/india-kaios-market-share-88... Global 74% market share for Android: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide > gaming like Xbox and playstation Yes, I think most deployed devices don't use Linux, and I'm not aware of any major linux using gaming console, but it's not unheard of, e.g. SNES classic mini. Also, from what I saw, Linux has a good foothold for game streaming offerings, but it's a new market and not yet established that it'll last. > smart TVs smart TVs are almost exclusively on Linux! https://www.statista.com/statistics/257778/number-of-smart-tvs-installed-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/257778/number-of-smart-t... WebOS, Tizen, Android TV, Roku OS, Firefox OS, Amazon Fire TV, all uses Linux.
• memset 6y ago
  I am not sure I agree with this statement in the absolute. I think about art, and artists as a musician myself. One advantage of copyright is that it does, indeed, give artists recourse when people use their works without compensation. The photographer whose picture was copied and pasted onto an advertisement. The musician trying to sell their first album. You could argue that litigation is too costly for an individual, which may be true, but this is one reason artists choose to sell their images via Getty. They gain access to a marketplace, and Getty handles licensing and enforcement, which makes it easier for artists to be fairly compensated for their work. This isn’t absolute either: there is enforcement too aggressive (ask any Youtube creator), or limits too long (Disney). But I cannot help but think that, with no copyright whatsoever, then the little guys will have a harder time protecting themselves from folks who would otherwise like to use that art without compensating the creator.
  • hyper_reality 6y ago
    The truth is somewhere between your statement and parent's, in my opinion. Copyright is necessary but the laws today are draconian and far too extensive. For works since 1978, copyright lasts for the entire length of the author's life, plus an additional 70 years. The "Mickey Mouse" protection act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act) increased this even further for some works. There's a need to allow artists and writers to make money from their creations and not just get their work instantly reproduced by pirates. At the same time, it's in the public interest for their work to become widely available after a short period of protection. I don't know exactly how long that period should be to maximally benefit society, but 15 years sounds a lot more reasonable than life+75 years. It's absolutely absurd that Arthur Conan Doyle's distant ancestors can today be suing people for creating derivatives of Sherlock Holmes, a literary character conceived in 1887. Sherlock Holmes belongs to the public, not some greedy relatives trying to leech a living from him.
    • cturner 6y ago
      "There's a need to allow artists and writers to make money" The current system does not satisfy that standard. Artists and writers don't make money due to far-reaching copyright. Musicians make money by selling tickets to concerts and contract performances. Journalists make money from newspaper pay-walls and advertising.
• bottled_poe 6y ago
  Those that absorb effort, resources and risk in creating something new/innovative should at least have the opportunity be compensated for their investment. The balance needs to be fair, and that’s what is being argued. It’s simply not as black and white as how you have described this issue.
• ubercow13 6y ago
  Would Linux have succeeded to the extent it has without copyright? Its licensing model depends heavily on copyright law.
  • diffeomorphism 6y ago
    I guess the argument is that "copyleft" is not needed without "copyright". In particular, look at the four freedoms: 0) free to run the program as you wish, for any purpose 1) The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. 2) The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others. 3) The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. The only thing taking away these freedoms is copyright and public domain software gives you all these freedoms. The only caveat is with 1) in that one could use digital restrictions management to make this harder. However, there is a difference between "circumventing DRM is difficult" and "circumventing DRM is illegal".
    • coldpie 6y ago
      No, the GPL depends on copyright to function. Otherwise it degenerates into a BSD-family license (actually not even that, as you wouldn't have to give credit to the original author). GPL requires you to provide the source of binary software you ship to your users by revoking your copyright grant if you do not do that. If you remove the threat of copyright enforcement, then I can ship your GPL library without shipping source.
      • gpm 6y ago
        A bsd family licence allows the next programmer to add on new legal restrictions (e.g. no modifying the binary, no distributing the modified binary, no reverse engineering the binary, ...). In a world with no copyright the source code requirement dies, but all the remaining freedoms stay intact. Reverse engineering and decompilers become much more important.
    • pgcj_poster 6y ago
      Copyright isn't the only thing that can keep people from having those freedoms -- even without copyright a developer could choose not to distribute the source code. It seems likely that less proprietary software would exist without copyright, though.
• bluecalm 6y ago
  Huge upfront investment like writing a book or composing music. It's a common moral intuition that it's not ok to take what others spent time developing and profit from it instead of them without adding much yourself. It's the scope and duration of the protection that is a problem but I think it's too simplistic to say we don't need it at all.
• traveler01 6y ago
  > I think it is quite likely that we as a society would be better off without any kind of copyright or IP. Well, I don't agree with that. Music, games, movies, need those kind of protections otherwise look at what happens in China... This case though, it's only Oracle being Oracle. A stupid greedy corporation trying to profit on other's successes.
• logicOnly 6y ago
  IP was never about society. It was a tool for the rich to create a monopoly on a product. IP disproportionately helps organizations rather than individuals. And the major owners of those organizations are the 0.01% class
  • Polylactic_acid 6y ago
    IMO IP protection should be short lived. Imagine if copyright ownership lasted 10 years. The profits made on producing a video game would be almost identical since almost all profit is made in the first few years and half of the lifetime profit is in the first week. What it would mean is the games that we all played as kids but are long since out of store shelves would now be free to distribute.
• crazypython 6y ago
  Richard Stallman would like 30 year copyrights, and to unbundle copyright.
  • rightbyte 6y ago
    I wonder when the first GPLd software will be public copyright and I can modify it and sell it at my wits? 60 years?
    • coldpie 6y ago
      Interesting question. The GPL was first published in 1989. Let's assume it was first used for something Stallman wrote, by himself, with no other authors. Stallman is 67 now. US male average life expectancy gives him about another 10 years (sorry to be morbid). Current US copyright law means his work is under copyright for 70 years after he passes away. So that's about 80 years from now, or in 2100 the first-ever GPL program can be distributed in binary form without its source, as it was written in 1989. What a gift to the public domain. US copyright law is utterly broken.
    • zoe1337 6y ago
      You can already modify and sell GPL licensed software. You only need to provide the modified source, and the same freedoms.
• E8DVHXqR 6y ago
  > I think it is quite likely that we as a society would be better off without any kind of copyright or IP. I agree with that. IP also doesn't make any sense to me from a philosophical perspective. I don't understand why making one thing once should give me a monopoly on making things that are similar to that thing. The fact that the question of how similar a thing must be to fall under my monopoly is so arbitrary and ill-defined also leads to an enormous amount of resources being wasted on litigation and designing around the law. Non-disclosure agreements are sufficient to allow an inventor to be first to market. They should not be able to use the government to enforce a monopoly after that.
• tenuousemphasis 6y ago
  Stephen Kinsella makes a great case for doing away with all intellectual property laws in Against Intellectual Property. https://mises.org/library/against-intellectual-property-0 https://mises.org/library/against-intellectual-property-0
• regulation_d 6y ago
  It seems to me very intuitive that a lack of IP protection of some sort discourages innovation. I cannot imagine wanting to write a book if I didn't have some recourse against people distributing my book freely. The policy concerns around IP protection for both patent and copyright are clear: the minimum amount of protection that doesn't discourage innovation. Lawmakers know or should know that we all benefit from a rich public domain, which is why there are limitations on both copyright and patents in terms of both duration and general application, and I am happy to argue that copyright is too strong, particularly in terms of duration (thanks Disney), but I simply can't agree that we "would be better off without any kind of copyright or IP".
  • npsimons 6y ago
    > I cannot imagine wanting to write a book if I didn't have some recourse against people distributing my book freely. Your lack of imagination is disappointing, and also hints at a failure of empathy.
    • regulation_d 6y ago
      There are so many ways of distributing thought and expression with little to no cost other than the time and effort of the creator. In practice, books almost always require more. I'm struggling to see how using a blog instead, is some sort of "failure of empathy". But I guess the broader point remains, even if only 20% of potential authors are, like me, so evil that they wouldn't devote a year of their lives to writing a book that they couldn't monetize in some way, well that's still represents a 20% decrease in innovation on some level.
• npsimons 6y ago
  > I think it is quite likely that we as a society would be better off without any kind of copyright or IP. This is pretty much the FSF's argument in a nutshell. It's pretty obvious what the end game for "intellectual property" is once you read RMS's "Right to Read."