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Personally I don't think that anything intangible can be property. And whenever I purchase something digital I consider the act to be a donation and/or payment
by 5560675260 6y ago
Personally I don't think that anything intangible can be property. And whenever I purchase something digital I consider the act to be a donation and/or payment for a service of delivery.
- Veen 6y agoIt’s an interesting attitude. Of course, if everyone thought that way most of the the things we buy digitally would never be made in the first place.
- 5560675260 6y agoIt would be a very different world, for sure. Public funding and patronage would play a significantly larger role than they do now, works produced non-commercially would have bigger prominence. It's harder to say what would happen in absence of patent laws. Higher reliance on trade secrets? Non-competes in every employment contracts? Overall I don't think that we would be significantly worse off, especially now, when it's technically possible for general public to engage in croudfunding.
- yters 6y agoI believe even technocratic communism would fail for the same reasons that agrarian and industrial communism failed. Lack of incentive to work hard, Goodhardt's law, destruction of those who try to retain property rights, etc. Even today's open source movement is very parasitic on the commercial sector. Without big tech companies OS would disappear.
- 5560675260 6y agoI don't thinks that lack of legal protections for IP is in any way an equivalent to communism. Money would still be on the table, it's just the way they are gained would be somewhat different. IP as a concept isn't even that old and our societies managed to exist, produce works of arts and various services just fine. As for the big tech firms - why wouldn't they exist? Would Google be disrupted if tomorrow all patents in the world became unenforceable? Or Amazon? Sure, MS might be in trouble, but what they are doing already feels like a gradual switch to a service/subscription based model.
- yters 6y agoWell, as someone who may create IP, I would like recourse to the legal system in order to enforce ownership of what I create. I imagine there are many people like me.
- FroshKiller 6y agoMost of the people who ever told a story, sang a song, or drew a picture had no notion of intellectual property or expectation of its legal protection. Yet they told, sang, and drew anyway.
- yters 6y agoDid they make multi-million dollar movies?
- c22 6y agoSome might consider this a benefit.
- yters 6y agoEverything intangible would not exist if someone didn't put in the effort to create it. As such they have a right to constrain the use of what they create, just as they have with tangible goods they create.