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I am genuinely interested in understanding how we could have innovation in a world where a creator is not entitled to benefits from their invention. Including a

I am genuinely interested in understanding how we could have innovation in a world where a creator is not entitled to benefits from their invention. Including any monetary benefits if they so choose.

breck 6y ago
If everyone who says they will stop creating new bits if they can't control people anymore, were to stop creating new bits, that would be a great world. (Btw, an example for your question is to look up the origin of this thing we are using to communicate—the WWW)
losteric 6y ago
Recipes do not have patent protection, yet there is plenty of innovation in restaurants. There are many paths to an innovation. I don't think the first person deserves such a monopoly. American IP law, in combination with the generally letigious society, has always seemed like a net source of innovation friction...
- harimau777 6y ago
  Recipes take skill to produce and in some cases significant effort to bring together exotic ingredients. That's not the case for media that can be copied almost effortlessly. Outside of running restaurants, people who innovate in recipes tend to make money via either writing cookbooks or hosting TV shows. Both of which are protected by IP.
- andreilys 6y ago
  Creating a new recipe doesn’t involve billions of dollars in research as is the case in pharma. A company that spends billions of dollars in research assumes they will be able to recoup the cost by having a monopoly on the drug they developed. If however competitors can flood the market with the same drug, they cannot recoup the cost and will subsequently go bankrupt. Without the proper incentives you can’t expect companies to pursue strategies that will lead to bankruptcy.
  - Avicebron 6y ago
    dude, it's about scale. If a food doesnt market well, the company won't survive, same as pharm. don't think adding billions of dollars to anything matters...jesus you're entitled and stupid
  - sologoub 6y ago
    For pharma specifically, trade secrets could be a decent alternative. Coke comes to mind as a success story in that regard - if it was protected by a patent, we’d be awash in cokes made by someone other than Coca-Cola company because patents expire. Instead, it’s a trade secret that can be kept indefinitely. You of course get a lot of imitation cokes and that’s great! More consumer choice. With Pharma, the idea is that you get generics after the patent expires. However, an interesting “what if” to ponder - what if the resources that go into generics went instead into the coke-wannabes of the pharma and actually resulted in more innovation? We’ll never know.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - breck 6y ago
    After a few years in medical research I learned a shocking truth: patents in medicine are killing more people than they are save. It’s an absolute disaster. Big pharma splintering into thousands of smaller players would be a huge improvement.
  - wpietri 6y ago
    I'm fine with that. Funding drugs based on profit potential is hugely distorting. E.g., Oxycontin. Or the whole pharmaceutical sales and promotion apparatus. Or the way it's much easier to fund something that mitigates a problem instead of curing it. We could publicly fund pharmaceutical research. Indeed, I suspect we'd be better off publicly funding it on cost terms alone. Global pharma research was $186 billion in 2019. [1] The US spends over $100 billion more on drugs compared with other countries' per-capita spending. [2] The current opioid crisis costs nearly $80 billion/year, [3] and was kicked off by a prescription opioid boom [4] driven by the promotion of Oxycontin. [5] [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/309471/randd-spending-share-of-top-pharmaceutical-companies/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/309471/randd-spending-sh... [2] https://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/what-makes-the-us-health-care-system-so-expensive-drugs/ https://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/what-makes-the-... [3] https://www.drugabuse.gov/drug-topics/opioids/opioid-overdose-crisis https://www.drugabuse.gov/drug-topics/opioids/opioid-overdos... [4] https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/epidemic/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/epidemic/index.html [5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/
Avicebron 6y ago
Because if financial reciprocation is your first incentive to be creative you've already lost the mind game. If you are a creative, you will understand that sometimes we just like to do things...
- adwn 6y ago
  You can't eat self-actualization, nor can you build houses from it. Sunshine and enjoyment of your work is not sufficient to sustain your body, not to speak of all the other needs that effectively require money to be fulfilled.
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    > Sunshine and enjoyment of your work is not sufficient to sustain your body, not to speak of all the other needs that effectively require money to be fulfilled. You've neglected to argue as to why these needs should be artificially subsidized by the issuance of state-enforced monopolies for certain concepts.
    - adwn 6y ago
      > You've neglected to argue as to why these needs should be artificially subsidized by the issuance of state-enforced monopolies for certain concepts. ... What? Avicebron argued that "financial reciprocation" should not be a priority of a creator, I countered that idealism won't keep you alive for long, and that creators need to make money to be able to create. Your post is completely beside the point.
      - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
        Why do they need special laws to subsidize their creation? People can pay them to make their work, that's historically how things were done. Now suddenly they need special laws so its illegal to take a photograph in public without permission? Of course they need to get paid in order to live and to work, so do I, so does everyone else. Can we now discuss why creators are so special that they get an entire class of quasi-property rights where enforcement is subsidized by the state?
chordalkeyboard 6y ago
> a world where a creator is not entitled to benefits from their invention This is a mis-statement of the anti-IP case. Given the abolishment of IP laws, creators are not prevented from benefitting from their invention. They merely no longer have the benefit of the state regulators in preventing others from following the inventor's example. > Including any monetary benefits if they so choose. The "monetary benefit" here is the power to exclude others from manufacturing the invention with the power of the state, and to compel society at large to pay for enforcement of this monopoly.
- harimau777 6y ago
  I think that many creators would struggle to benefit if their creations can be trivially copied by others.
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    They might struggle to sell licenses to their ideas, given that license is merely permission to perform a trivial task they are equally prepared to perform sans license, they could always benefit by selling their creative labor as work on the market.
    - harimau777 6y ago
      That would mean that artists were only able to make money if they are working directly for someone else. That doesn't seem fair.
      - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
        > That would mean that artists were only able to make money if they are working directly for someone else. Nonsense, they can sell their own artwork too.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- 6y ago
disown 6y ago
> I am genuinely interested in understanding how we could have innovation in a world where a creator is not entitled to benefits from their invention. We've had innovations for thousands of years without IP. Not to mention that Linux and GNU exist for a reason. Do you think people will stop writing books, making music, etc without IP laws. > Including any monetary benefits if they so choose. How does removing IP laws prevent you from profiting from your work?
rektide 6y ago
> I am genuinely interested in understanding how we could have innovation in a world where a creator is not entitled to benefits from their invention. Including any monetary benefits if they so choose. they are entitled to the benefits of their creation. by executing their idea better than others. and selling that execution competitively.
ajb 6y ago
Recent successful companies have largely done so because of execution, not IP protection. They have had competitors trying the exact same idea who still lost. This is especially the case with the move to SaaS, even copyright isn't so important as in the days of packaged software. A lot of the unicorns innovated on business model, and business models aren't protected anyway.
6510 6y ago
Real innovators care about the journey not the money. Some money is needed sometimes to get or keep going, we have this money, we have plenty of money. We can also chose to reward innovators both for the effort and the result. It should be in proportion tho, an invention that makes you the owner of the world is not desirable for anyone else. And finally, the most ironic, you don't have innovation if you are renting it. (they don't even have to let you rent it) Its a well crafted con that turns you into a subject to be exploited in any way the ~~innovator~~ owner chooses.
pdkl95 6y ago
Andrew "bunnie" Huang explains an alternative model of innovation in his talk An Alternative to the American way of Innovation[1]. The over-simplified summary is that instead of worrying about the losing the monopoly protection of copyrights and patents - which are expensive to enforce and often bypassed - consider the new types of innovation that become possible when you have access to the all of the knowledge that was previously locked behind IP monopolies. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S39fhrGjr4U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S39fhrGjr4U
cannabis_sam 6y ago
> a world where a creator is not entitled to benefits from their invention. Do you mean a world where YouTube takes money from creators and give it to corporations that claim ownership of public domain music, or do you mean independent artist who gets zero money from their Spotify plays, since the three company cartel of record companies have forced streaming services to pool the artists’ money and then give most of that money to the biggest artists fronted by those same three record companies..? This abuse is wholly dependent on the outrageous IP laws we live under. Which creators are you talking about?
Viliam1234 6y ago
Who is the "creator"? If it is someone who composed a song or wrote a book, that word makes sense; without them the song or book would not exist. (Ironically, copyrights for songs are often not owned by the people who composed them, because contracts with publishers often require selling the copyright to them. At the end, you may be forbidden to sing your own song without paying.) But in patents, sometimes it is just a person who noticed that existing technologies X and Y could be used together, and filed the patent first. If not them, someone else would have noticed it somewhat later. Even worse, someone else may get the idea independently a few weeks later... and then be sued for using it. Actually, if you invent something, it is always risky to use it, because you can never be sure whether someone else didn't patent it before you. (Did you do an expensive research of existing patents? Maybe you used a wrong keyword.) (By the way, patents also sometimes do not belong to people who had the idea.)

I am genuinely interested in understanding how we could have innovation in a world where a creator is not entitled to benefits from their invention. Including any monetary benefits if they so choose.

breck 6y ago

If everyone who says they will stop creating new bits if they can't control people anymore, were to stop creating new bits, that would be a great world. (Btw, an example for your question is to look up the origin of this thing we are using to communicate—the WWW)

losteric 6y ago

Recipes do not have patent protection, yet there is plenty of innovation in restaurants. There are many paths to an innovation. I don't think the first person deserves such a monopoly. American IP law, in combination with the generally letigious society, has always seemed like a net source of innovation friction...

harimau777 6y ago
Recipes take skill to produce and in some cases significant effort to bring together exotic ingredients. That's not the case for media that can be copied almost effortlessly. Outside of running restaurants, people who innovate in recipes tend to make money via either writing cookbooks or hosting TV shows. Both of which are protected by IP.
andreilys 6y ago
Creating a new recipe doesn’t involve billions of dollars in research as is the case in pharma. A company that spends billions of dollars in research assumes they will be able to recoup the cost by having a monopoly on the drug they developed. If however competitors can flood the market with the same drug, they cannot recoup the cost and will subsequently go bankrupt. Without the proper incentives you can’t expect companies to pursue strategies that will lead to bankruptcy.
- Avicebron 6y ago
  dude, it's about scale. If a food doesnt market well, the company won't survive, same as pharm. don't think adding billions of dollars to anything matters...jesus you're entitled and stupid
- sologoub 6y ago
  For pharma specifically, trade secrets could be a decent alternative. Coke comes to mind as a success story in that regard - if it was protected by a patent, we’d be awash in cokes made by someone other than Coca-Cola company because patents expire. Instead, it’s a trade secret that can be kept indefinitely. You of course get a lot of imitation cokes and that’s great! More consumer choice. With Pharma, the idea is that you get generics after the patent expires. However, an interesting “what if” to ponder - what if the resources that go into generics went instead into the coke-wannabes of the pharma and actually resulted in more innovation? We’ll never know.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- breck 6y ago
  After a few years in medical research I learned a shocking truth: patents in medicine are killing more people than they are save. It’s an absolute disaster. Big pharma splintering into thousands of smaller players would be a huge improvement.
- wpietri 6y ago
  I'm fine with that. Funding drugs based on profit potential is hugely distorting. E.g., Oxycontin. Or the whole pharmaceutical sales and promotion apparatus. Or the way it's much easier to fund something that mitigates a problem instead of curing it. We could publicly fund pharmaceutical research. Indeed, I suspect we'd be better off publicly funding it on cost terms alone. Global pharma research was $186 billion in 2019. [1] The US spends over $100 billion more on drugs compared with other countries' per-capita spending. [2] The current opioid crisis costs nearly $80 billion/year, [3] and was kicked off by a prescription opioid boom [4] driven by the promotion of Oxycontin. [5] [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/309471/randd-spending-share-of-top-pharmaceutical-companies/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/309471/randd-spending-sh... [2] https://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/what-makes-the-us-health-care-system-so-expensive-drugs/ https://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/what-makes-the-... [3] https://www.drugabuse.gov/drug-topics/opioids/opioid-overdose-crisis https://www.drugabuse.gov/drug-topics/opioids/opioid-overdos... [4] https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/epidemic/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/epidemic/index.html [5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/

Avicebron 6y ago

Because if financial reciprocation is your first incentive to be creative you've already lost the mind game. If you are a creative, you will understand that sometimes we just like to do things...

adwn 6y ago
You can't eat self-actualization, nor can you build houses from it. Sunshine and enjoyment of your work is not sufficient to sustain your body, not to speak of all the other needs that effectively require money to be fulfilled.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  > Sunshine and enjoyment of your work is not sufficient to sustain your body, not to speak of all the other needs that effectively require money to be fulfilled. You've neglected to argue as to why these needs should be artificially subsidized by the issuance of state-enforced monopolies for certain concepts.
  - adwn 6y ago
    > You've neglected to argue as to why these needs should be artificially subsidized by the issuance of state-enforced monopolies for certain concepts. ... What? Avicebron argued that "financial reciprocation" should not be a priority of a creator, I countered that idealism won't keep you alive for long, and that creators need to make money to be able to create. Your post is completely beside the point.
    - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
      Why do they need special laws to subsidize their creation? People can pay them to make their work, that's historically how things were done. Now suddenly they need special laws so its illegal to take a photograph in public without permission? Of course they need to get paid in order to live and to work, so do I, so does everyone else. Can we now discuss why creators are so special that they get an entire class of quasi-property rights where enforcement is subsidized by the state?

chordalkeyboard 6y ago

> a world where a creator is not entitled to benefits from their invention This is a mis-statement of the anti-IP case. Given the abolishment of IP laws, creators are not prevented from benefitting from their invention. They merely no longer have the benefit of the state regulators in preventing others from following the inventor's example. > Including any monetary benefits if they so choose. The "monetary benefit" here is the power to exclude others from manufacturing the invention with the power of the state, and to compel society at large to pay for enforcement of this monopoly.

harimau777 6y ago
I think that many creators would struggle to benefit if their creations can be trivially copied by others.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  They might struggle to sell licenses to their ideas, given that license is merely permission to perform a trivial task they are equally prepared to perform sans license, they could always benefit by selling their creative labor as work on the market.
  - harimau777 6y ago
    That would mean that artists were only able to make money if they are working directly for someone else. That doesn't seem fair.
    - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
      > That would mean that artists were only able to make money if they are working directly for someone else. Nonsense, they can sell their own artwork too.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
6y ago

disown 6y ago

> I am genuinely interested in understanding how we could have innovation in a world where a creator is not entitled to benefits from their invention. We've had innovations for thousands of years without IP. Not to mention that Linux and GNU exist for a reason. Do you think people will stop writing books, making music, etc without IP laws. > Including any monetary benefits if they so choose. How does removing IP laws prevent you from profiting from your work?

rektide 6y ago

> I am genuinely interested in understanding how we could have innovation in a world where a creator is not entitled to benefits from their invention. Including any monetary benefits if they so choose. they are entitled to the benefits of their creation. by executing their idea better than others. and selling that execution competitively.

ajb 6y ago

Recent successful companies have largely done so because of execution, not IP protection. They have had competitors trying the exact same idea who still lost. This is especially the case with the move to SaaS, even copyright isn't so important as in the days of packaged software. A lot of the unicorns innovated on business model, and business models aren't protected anyway.

6510 6y ago

Real innovators care about the journey not the money. Some money is needed sometimes to get or keep going, we have this money, we have plenty of money. We can also chose to reward innovators both for the effort and the result. It should be in proportion tho, an invention that makes you the owner of the world is not desirable for anyone else. And finally, the most ironic, you don't have innovation if you are renting it. (they don't even have to let you rent it) Its a well crafted con that turns you into a subject to be exploited in any way the ~~innovator~~ owner chooses.

pdkl95 6y ago

Andrew "bunnie" Huang explains an alternative model of innovation in his talk An Alternative to the American way of Innovation[1]. The over-simplified summary is that instead of worrying about the losing the monopoly protection of copyrights and patents - which are expensive to enforce and often bypassed - consider the new types of innovation that become possible when you have access to the all of the knowledge that was previously locked behind IP monopolies. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S39fhrGjr4U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S39fhrGjr4U

cannabis_sam 6y ago

> a world where a creator is not entitled to benefits from their invention. Do you mean a world where YouTube takes money from creators and give it to corporations that claim ownership of public domain music, or do you mean independent artist who gets zero money from their Spotify plays, since the three company cartel of record companies have forced streaming services to pool the artists’ money and then give most of that money to the biggest artists fronted by those same three record companies..? This abuse is wholly dependent on the outrageous IP laws we live under. Which creators are you talking about?

Viliam1234 6y ago

Who is the "creator"? If it is someone who composed a song or wrote a book, that word makes sense; without them the song or book would not exist. (Ironically, copyrights for songs are often not owned by the people who composed them, because contracts with publishers often require selling the copyright to them. At the end, you may be forbidden to sing your own song without paying.) But in patents, sometimes it is just a person who noticed that existing technologies X and Y could be used together, and filed the patent first. If not them, someone else would have noticed it somewhat later. Even worse, someone else may get the idea independently a few weeks later... and then be sued for using it. Actually, if you invent something, it is always risky to use it, because you can never be sure whether someone else didn't patent it before you. (Did you do an expensive research of existing patents? Maybe you used a wrong keyword.) (By the way, patents also sometimes do not belong to people who had the idea.)