5 ms·

> If 2020 taught me anything, it's that society can come close to the brink pretty quickly. I thought there was an inevitable trend toward freedom, but recently

> If 2020 taught me anything, it's that society can come close to the brink pretty quickly. I thought there was an inevitable trend toward freedom, but recently think it's perilous. We need ideas to flow to create a more distributed, less unequal, world, and we need it now. We need to unshackle the people. This seems like an odd claim, as society as a whole was able to weather the pandemic overall in incredible comfort due to technology and content created under our IP regime. And we got a vaccine, covered by IP laws, to people with incredible speed. If anything - it's working well. I think the burden is on you to demonstrate that we'd have these things without the IP environment of past 100 years.

chordalkeyboard 6y ago
> weather the pandemic overall in incredible comfort due to technology and content created under our IP regime strike "under" insert "in spite of" > demonstrate that we'd have these things without the IP environment of past 100 years. IP are laws that prohibit who is allowed to manufacture and profit by certain types of goods. The burden of proof rests on those who think that those goods would not exist if more people were permitted to produce them. The presumption is that prohibitive laws have the effect of decreasing the things they prohibit.
- backing 6y ago
  And how would it change the world to be more equal?
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    More people would have the opportunity to produce live-saving drugs, fewer people would be subject to state violence as a consequence of performing acts that had no victim.
  - worik 6y ago
    Equality is not what we need or want. Fairness, comradery, and equity are enough.
- worik 6y ago
  I do not think your beef is with IP. I think you are anti private property. If private property exists, with any sort of free exchange, then IP that takes resources to produce and nothing to copy will need protection under some sort of property law. A high tech society is imaginable in the absence of private property, but generally the abolition of private property is not considered as a serious option.
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    > If private property exists, with any sort of free exchange, then IP that takes resources to produce and nothing to copy will need protection under some sort of property law. No, it doesn't need to be protected. The ability to copy is a feature, not a bug. Laws that limit the copying of data decrease the proliferation of that data in most cases. > A high tech society is imaginable in the absence of private property, but generally the abolition of private property is not considered as a serious option. I see people mentioning it but I agree its considered to be somewhat fringe by most. A society without private property would likely devolve to subsistence level or recreate propertarian norms.
    - _huayra_ 6y ago
      Private property is definitely one of the things that has benefited society the most, but the reward distribution has skewed in the wrong direction. When one has too much power or capital, the ability for one to rewrite the laws that govern the taxation of the accrued private property (intellectual or physical) increases as well. This is why those with the most private property can essentially do as they please; the benefits they derive from their private property are disproportionately high compared to the cost that society incurs protecting their private property. For instance, the workload that the government is tasked with to protect private property of these elites at home (e.g. the large amount of police resources that need to be available for large tech campuses or in rich areas) and abroad (e.g. by tasking the Acronym Agencies with searching for foreign and domestic threats, by using the might of the dollar and the military to basically force their will on other countries through political, physical, or financial violence (FATCA comes to mind...) [0]). Private property needs to stay, but the incarnation we find ourselves in today needs to evolve for it to survive. Either through taxes or government stakeholdership in corporations (e.g. Yanis Varoufakis' proposal that companies must give X percentage of their shares to a common fund such that the incentives are aligned for both the companies and the government to act in the long-term interests of its citizens), this imbalance of power needs to be corrected for. The one thing undermining this is a distrust in the US government that is rightfully earned after decades of neoliberalism (and, to a different perspective, neoconservatism) has worked hand in hand with the elites to steal and pillage the private property of the common man (e.g. how Warren Buffet's secretary pays a higher tax percentage that he does). Unfortunately I don't see this happening. Things are getting worse in the US as public institutions are eroding or becoming more kleptocratic, all the while the elites are starting to act more like feudal lords, thinking that some libertarian wet dream of privatization of everything is the answer (private military and private firefighters come to mind for the extremely wealthy few). This technofeudalism will probably only be stopped by some major shift in global power (e.g. away from the dollar as the world's reserve currency, which I suspect would provoke the US into military action one way or another) If anyone wants to read a great article about what happened to America's institutions, I recommend Francis Fukuyama's America in Decay [1]. His "end of history" argument seems very premature given what's happened since he wrote that, but most of his other work is spot on. [0] I certainly don't agree that these policies are beneficial in aggregate, as they result in international hostility, the things Snowden revealed, etc. It is, however, a thing that government does provide for the monied elites. [1] https://cf.linnbenton.edu/artcom/social_science/clarkd/upload/Fukuyama,%20America%20in%20Decay.pdf https://cf.linnbenton.edu/artcom/social_science/clarkd/uploa...
6510 6y ago
https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/12/10/urgently-waive-intellectual-property-rules-vaccine https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/12/10/urgently-waive-intellect...

chordalkeyboard 6y ago

> weather the pandemic overall in incredible comfort due to technology and content created under our IP regime strike "under" insert "in spite of" > demonstrate that we'd have these things without the IP environment of past 100 years. IP are laws that prohibit who is allowed to manufacture and profit by certain types of goods. The burden of proof rests on those who think that those goods would not exist if more people were permitted to produce them. The presumption is that prohibitive laws have the effect of decreasing the things they prohibit.

backing 6y ago
And how would it change the world to be more equal?
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  More people would have the opportunity to produce live-saving drugs, fewer people would be subject to state violence as a consequence of performing acts that had no victim.
- worik 6y ago
  Equality is not what we need or want. Fairness, comradery, and equity are enough.
worik 6y ago
I do not think your beef is with IP. I think you are anti private property. If private property exists, with any sort of free exchange, then IP that takes resources to produce and nothing to copy will need protection under some sort of property law. A high tech society is imaginable in the absence of private property, but generally the abolition of private property is not considered as a serious option.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  > If private property exists, with any sort of free exchange, then IP that takes resources to produce and nothing to copy will need protection under some sort of property law. No, it doesn't need to be protected. The ability to copy is a feature, not a bug. Laws that limit the copying of data decrease the proliferation of that data in most cases. > A high tech society is imaginable in the absence of private property, but generally the abolition of private property is not considered as a serious option. I see people mentioning it but I agree its considered to be somewhat fringe by most. A society without private property would likely devolve to subsistence level or recreate propertarian norms.
  - _huayra_ 6y ago
    Private property is definitely one of the things that has benefited society the most, but the reward distribution has skewed in the wrong direction. When one has too much power or capital, the ability for one to rewrite the laws that govern the taxation of the accrued private property (intellectual or physical) increases as well. This is why those with the most private property can essentially do as they please; the benefits they derive from their private property are disproportionately high compared to the cost that society incurs protecting their private property. For instance, the workload that the government is tasked with to protect private property of these elites at home (e.g. the large amount of police resources that need to be available for large tech campuses or in rich areas) and abroad (e.g. by tasking the Acronym Agencies with searching for foreign and domestic threats, by using the might of the dollar and the military to basically force their will on other countries through political, physical, or financial violence (FATCA comes to mind...) [0]). Private property needs to stay, but the incarnation we find ourselves in today needs to evolve for it to survive. Either through taxes or government stakeholdership in corporations (e.g. Yanis Varoufakis' proposal that companies must give X percentage of their shares to a common fund such that the incentives are aligned for both the companies and the government to act in the long-term interests of its citizens), this imbalance of power needs to be corrected for. The one thing undermining this is a distrust in the US government that is rightfully earned after decades of neoliberalism (and, to a different perspective, neoconservatism) has worked hand in hand with the elites to steal and pillage the private property of the common man (e.g. how Warren Buffet's secretary pays a higher tax percentage that he does). Unfortunately I don't see this happening. Things are getting worse in the US as public institutions are eroding or becoming more kleptocratic, all the while the elites are starting to act more like feudal lords, thinking that some libertarian wet dream of privatization of everything is the answer (private military and private firefighters come to mind for the extremely wealthy few). This technofeudalism will probably only be stopped by some major shift in global power (e.g. away from the dollar as the world's reserve currency, which I suspect would provoke the US into military action one way or another) If anyone wants to read a great article about what happened to America's institutions, I recommend Francis Fukuyama's America in Decay [1]. His "end of history" argument seems very premature given what's happened since he wrote that, but most of his other work is spot on. [0] I certainly don't agree that these policies are beneficial in aggregate, as they result in international hostility, the things Snowden revealed, etc. It is, however, a thing that government does provide for the monied elites. [1] https://cf.linnbenton.edu/artcom/social_science/clarkd/upload/Fukuyama,%20America%20in%20Decay.pdf https://cf.linnbenton.edu/artcom/social_science/clarkd/uploa...

6510 6y ago

https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/12/10/urgently-waive-intellectual-property-rules-vaccine https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/12/10/urgently-waive-intellect...