5 ms·

Patents and copyrights in many cases have become a tumor, destroying their original purposes to enable rent seeking from disgusting and harmful organizations.

namibj 6y ago
Every time I tried to find reasons for their continued existence strong enough to outweigh obvious downsides, I was met with utter failure. Copyright causes massive bookkeeping and furthermore, severe artistic repression. It's also easy to see that, by far, artists don't create things to actually make a living from copyright-based forced royalties. Patron and Kickstarter have shown that we are very much capable of funding artists remotely, either in an ongoing, post-payed basis for the former, or a pre-payed, project-specific funding way for the latter. As for patents, it should be easy to demonstrate concrete societal harm through monopolization and inhibition of progress (by blocking multiple recent inventions from being combined); as example for the former I give Sawstop (there are many reasons to not want to buy a whole machine from one specific vendor), examples for the latter are small firearms (handgun/rifle) design and the core technologies the https://www.mpegla.com/ https://www.mpegla.com/ practices rent-seeking on, which are embedded into hardware, but e.g. foregone in favor of software decoding (or appropriate alternatives for the other things they administer). I expect it's relatively easy to figure out a lower bound for the environmental harm from not using hardware decoding or choosing H.264 over H.265 purely for licensing reasons (and tanking the higher bandwidth costs). Trademarks, however, seem to serve a purpose. As an example for the drug R&D world, handling at least human trials by having a shared pot that everyone who wants to can invest in, and which is payed back e.g. double or whatever a suitable scheme for determining the overall payback sum, financed through a fixed VAT levied on the drug in question if it ever happens to get sold. It might potentially work better as a sort of bond auction, where the study administrators calculate the required budget, and public founders offer to pay X$ now in exchange for getting Y$ back via that tax system, while the auctioneer(system) takes from the offers that want the least return (in %), until the budget is reached. If the sum of all funding offers is insufficient, no money changes hands and the study doesn't happen. I'd suggest a tax rate between 5 and 40% for such a system. In the movie industry, people would put their money where their mouth is, and (likely through some intermediary agencies) pay to "make the sequel happen", or to choose which TV pilot shall get a first season. There might be need for some sort of anti-tivoization regulation to replace what the GPL3 accomplished there, but overall, software seems to be hurt by copyright preventing a "on the shoulders of giants" process to soak deep into less and less theoretical cases. See ZFS vs. Linux, if you need an example.
- silexia 6y ago
  I agree with everything you said here pretty much. The way I would address the problem is to perhaps outright get rid of patents, limit copyright to 5 years, eliminate any ability to copyright software, and allow for trademarks as that is just the identifier for a specific brand.
  - namibj 6y ago
    Yes, patents stopped fulfilling their societal contract decades ago. I do no think anything critical necessarily relies on them being a thing. As for copyright, though.... a large part of the downsides lie with having to do bookkeeping and such. I'd argue for a total elimination of copyright, only keeping some very basic anti-plagiarism clauses (don't copy and then claim it was you who did it). They have to rely on intent, however. Accidentally reciting a joke and thinking you came up with it has to be very far from the grey zone. Trademarks are a vehicle for reputation and trust in a market, see e.g. how you can't buy poor quality tools branded "Knipex", or how Samsung is know to not employ overly deceptive branding/advertising for their portable flash media, along with being known for at least decent reliability.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  > It's also easy to see that, by far, artists don't create things to actually make a living from copyright-based forced royalties. I would expect the exact opposite. Do you have any data? I’d expect the primary money maker for artists is people buying their products or getting those products from the channels the artist chooses. E.g buying a dvd or watching my show on Netflix or watching my video on my YouTube channel or buying a print of my drawing. Patreon processes payments of less than a billion dollars per year, so artists’ money seems to be, by far, made via copyright protection. There’s a question about what fraction of artists make a living, and I expect the majority don’t make a living from it. Most artists probably don’t do it for the money. Most probably just have it as a hobby. That said I’m glad some artists can make a living at it. I have yet to see any evidence that switching to a copyright free world would help anyone but the hobbyists and big companies who can afford to exploit the fruits of the hobbyists labors (I imagine some kind of YouTube like company going around taking everyone’s content and putting it in a central place and making bank off ads). You seem to be getting at this with your mention about the need for “anti-tivoization” regulation. When you flesh that out, trying to regulate away the worst exploitative practices and enabling a professional class of artists, you’d end up with something that looks a lot like copyright law.
matheusmoreira 6y ago
Yes, it's disgusting. Intellectual property in general makes little sense but copyright in particular is just so bad. It's gotten to the point copyright infringement is civil disobedience. People should just do it, consequences be damned, until governments get rid of these outdated laws.

namibj 6y ago

Every time I tried to find reasons for their continued existence strong enough to outweigh obvious downsides, I was met with utter failure. Copyright causes massive bookkeeping and furthermore, severe artistic repression. It's also easy to see that, by far, artists don't create things to actually make a living from copyright-based forced royalties. Patron and Kickstarter have shown that we are very much capable of funding artists remotely, either in an ongoing, post-payed basis for the former, or a pre-payed, project-specific funding way for the latter. As for patents, it should be easy to demonstrate concrete societal harm through monopolization and inhibition of progress (by blocking multiple recent inventions from being combined); as example for the former I give Sawstop (there are many reasons to not want to buy a whole machine from one specific vendor), examples for the latter are small firearms (handgun/rifle) design and the core technologies the https://www.mpegla.com/ https://www.mpegla.com/ practices rent-seeking on, which are embedded into hardware, but e.g. foregone in favor of software decoding (or appropriate alternatives for the other things they administer). I expect it's relatively easy to figure out a lower bound for the environmental harm from not using hardware decoding or choosing H.264 over H.265 purely for licensing reasons (and tanking the higher bandwidth costs). Trademarks, however, seem to serve a purpose. As an example for the drug R&D world, handling at least human trials by having a shared pot that everyone who wants to can invest in, and which is payed back e.g. double or whatever a suitable scheme for determining the overall payback sum, financed through a fixed VAT levied on the drug in question if it ever happens to get sold. It might potentially work better as a sort of bond auction, where the study administrators calculate the required budget, and public founders offer to pay X$ now in exchange for getting Y$ back via that tax system, while the auctioneer(system) takes from the offers that want the least return (in %), until the budget is reached. If the sum of all funding offers is insufficient, no money changes hands and the study doesn't happen. I'd suggest a tax rate between 5 and 40% for such a system. In the movie industry, people would put their money where their mouth is, and (likely through some intermediary agencies) pay to "make the sequel happen", or to choose which TV pilot shall get a first season. There might be need for some sort of anti-tivoization regulation to replace what the GPL3 accomplished there, but overall, software seems to be hurt by copyright preventing a "on the shoulders of giants" process to soak deep into less and less theoretical cases. See ZFS vs. Linux, if you need an example.

silexia 6y ago
I agree with everything you said here pretty much. The way I would address the problem is to perhaps outright get rid of patents, limit copyright to 5 years, eliminate any ability to copyright software, and allow for trademarks as that is just the identifier for a specific brand.
- namibj 6y ago
  Yes, patents stopped fulfilling their societal contract decades ago. I do no think anything critical necessarily relies on them being a thing. As for copyright, though.... a large part of the downsides lie with having to do bookkeeping and such. I'd argue for a total elimination of copyright, only keeping some very basic anti-plagiarism clauses (don't copy and then claim it was you who did it). They have to rely on intent, however. Accidentally reciting a joke and thinking you came up with it has to be very far from the grey zone. Trademarks are a vehicle for reputation and trust in a market, see e.g. how you can't buy poor quality tools branded "Knipex", or how Samsung is know to not employ overly deceptive branding/advertising for their portable flash media, along with being known for at least decent reliability.
6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
> It's also easy to see that, by far, artists don't create things to actually make a living from copyright-based forced royalties. I would expect the exact opposite. Do you have any data? I’d expect the primary money maker for artists is people buying their products or getting those products from the channels the artist chooses. E.g buying a dvd or watching my show on Netflix or watching my video on my YouTube channel or buying a print of my drawing. Patreon processes payments of less than a billion dollars per year, so artists’ money seems to be, by far, made via copyright protection. There’s a question about what fraction of artists make a living, and I expect the majority don’t make a living from it. Most artists probably don’t do it for the money. Most probably just have it as a hobby. That said I’m glad some artists can make a living at it. I have yet to see any evidence that switching to a copyright free world would help anyone but the hobbyists and big companies who can afford to exploit the fruits of the hobbyists labors (I imagine some kind of YouTube like company going around taking everyone’s content and putting it in a central place and making bank off ads). You seem to be getting at this with your mention about the need for “anti-tivoization” regulation. When you flesh that out, trying to regulate away the worst exploitative practices and enabling a professional class of artists, you’d end up with something that looks a lot like copyright law.

matheusmoreira 6y ago

Yes, it's disgusting. Intellectual property in general makes little sense but copyright in particular is just so bad. It's gotten to the point copyright infringement is civil disobedience. People should just do it, consequences be damned, until governments get rid of these outdated laws.