4 ms·

Copyright serves a useful purpose, even if it’s being abused here and the modern interpretation is a distortion of its original intent. https://news.ycombinato

Copyright serves a useful purpose, even if it’s being abused here and the modern interpretation is a distortion of its original intent. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26028392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26028392 As a concept it exists to promote the progress of science and useful arts - to incentivize people to create. This is something we want in a society.

breck 6y ago
> As a concept it exists to promote the progress of science and useful arts - to incentivize people to create. You could also say "As a concept slaves exists to promote the cotton industry. This is something we want in a society." It doesn't matter if you lie and call him the "Red Angel", if when you stop and examine him closely he's really the devil.
- fossuser 6y ago
  Obviously you have no interest in good faith discussion so I’ll leave it here.
  - breck 6y ago
    It is not arguing in bad faith to say that no, the sun does not revolve around the earth and just because people repeat that a lot does not make it true. If you can name one single useful copyrighted work that is not composed of >90% "infringement" I'll apologize and shut up. Creators are not the creators they think they are. Everyone stands on the shoulders of giants, more so than they admit, even people who repeat that phrase. Creators should work for their income like the rest of us, and not depend on restricting the freedoms of others so that they can be more comfortable. The public domain is the only domain there should be. We abolished royalty in the USA but somehow we let the scourge of royalties remain. If you don't want people to share your ideas, fine, keep them to yourself. We don't need the help of any copyright leeches. We'll do just fine without those "contributions". -Breck, via the World Wide Web and TCP/IP
    - fossuser 6y ago
      It’s bad faith to pretend slavery is the same as a limited time monopoly to incentivize people to create things. Imagine you’re creating a new country and you want people to make things, how can you incentivize this? One way is to give people who make things a small time where they can make money from their creations, especially in cases where creating the thing requires a lot of capital investment (drug discovery). In the case of patents, you want them to share the detailed specs on their inventions with the public rather than keeping them secret. This way people are incentivized to share their inventions with the public so they get the protection. Without copyright the bigger players and distributors make all the money. The only model possible is some donation based scheme which doesn’t work for high capital investment projects. Without patents companies keep everything a trade secret. There’s a lot of stuff in the modern world that would not exist in this one and a lot of people that make their money creating things that could not do so without IP law. Is copyright law today broken? Yes. Are software patents in particular stupid? Yes. Is copyright and patent law broken from first principles or in conflict with useful incentive structure in society? No. There’s nuance and complexity here - people like to make everything simple and one sided, but it’s not: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-deb...
      - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
        > Imagine you’re creating a new country and you want people to make things, how can you incentivize this? You could pay them? > One way is to give people who make things a small time where they can make money from their creations, especially in cases where creating the thing requires a lot of capital investment (drug discovery). Yeah, you could claim the right to put your hands on anyone who made a copy of a creation, because you want people to make stuff and penalizing anyone other than the first person to make a thing helps the original artists get paid. Of course if you wanted to incentivize creators you could also not punish them for copying other creators because the copy is another creation that you claim to want. > Without copyright the bigger players and distributors make all the money. Honestly I think its the other way around, you have to be big enough to hire a lawyer to enforce your copyright, and the bigger you are, the more / better lawyers you can get. Mickey Mouse and Disney are the ur-counterexample here. > The only model possible is some donation based scheme which doesn’t work for high capital investment projects. Without patents companies keep everything a trade secret. There’s a lot of stuff in the modern world that would not exist in this one and a lot of people that make their money creating things that could not do so without IP law. Perhaps we would be better off without all of this. > Is copyright and patent law broken from first principles or in conflict with useful incentive structure in society? No. Hard disagree. Yes it is.
ggrrhh_ta 6y ago
Sincerely, most of my life, me and most people around me have been ecstatic to create and share until we grew up and were drown into the collective dream of the possibility of getting rich (or at least getting by) by creating for money. And if you go to places were people are still not yet slaves to themselves - and you don't have to travel too far, just in the countryside, small islands in Europe, etc., you will see that people create and create continuously and ingenuously without ever thinking of copyrighting/trademarking/patenting. If you can't believe it, well, that's OK - I find it kind of sad, because I have experienced that and I do experience that and it is beautiful. But thinking that copyright actually incentivizes people to create is also fine - maybe it does for other subset of people.

breck 6y ago

> As a concept it exists to promote the progress of science and useful arts - to incentivize people to create. You could also say "As a concept slaves exists to promote the cotton industry. This is something we want in a society." It doesn't matter if you lie and call him the "Red Angel", if when you stop and examine him closely he's really the devil.

fossuser 6y ago
Obviously you have no interest in good faith discussion so I’ll leave it here.
- breck 6y ago
  It is not arguing in bad faith to say that no, the sun does not revolve around the earth and just because people repeat that a lot does not make it true. If you can name one single useful copyrighted work that is not composed of >90% "infringement" I'll apologize and shut up. Creators are not the creators they think they are. Everyone stands on the shoulders of giants, more so than they admit, even people who repeat that phrase. Creators should work for their income like the rest of us, and not depend on restricting the freedoms of others so that they can be more comfortable. The public domain is the only domain there should be. We abolished royalty in the USA but somehow we let the scourge of royalties remain. If you don't want people to share your ideas, fine, keep them to yourself. We don't need the help of any copyright leeches. We'll do just fine without those "contributions". -Breck, via the World Wide Web and TCP/IP
  - fossuser 6y ago
    It’s bad faith to pretend slavery is the same as a limited time monopoly to incentivize people to create things. Imagine you’re creating a new country and you want people to make things, how can you incentivize this? One way is to give people who make things a small time where they can make money from their creations, especially in cases where creating the thing requires a lot of capital investment (drug discovery). In the case of patents, you want them to share the detailed specs on their inventions with the public rather than keeping them secret. This way people are incentivized to share their inventions with the public so they get the protection. Without copyright the bigger players and distributors make all the money. The only model possible is some donation based scheme which doesn’t work for high capital investment projects. Without patents companies keep everything a trade secret. There’s a lot of stuff in the modern world that would not exist in this one and a lot of people that make their money creating things that could not do so without IP law. Is copyright law today broken? Yes. Are software patents in particular stupid? Yes. Is copyright and patent law broken from first principles or in conflict with useful incentive structure in society? No. There’s nuance and complexity here - people like to make everything simple and one sided, but it’s not: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-deb...
    - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
      > Imagine you’re creating a new country and you want people to make things, how can you incentivize this? You could pay them? > One way is to give people who make things a small time where they can make money from their creations, especially in cases where creating the thing requires a lot of capital investment (drug discovery). Yeah, you could claim the right to put your hands on anyone who made a copy of a creation, because you want people to make stuff and penalizing anyone other than the first person to make a thing helps the original artists get paid. Of course if you wanted to incentivize creators you could also not punish them for copying other creators because the copy is another creation that you claim to want. > Without copyright the bigger players and distributors make all the money. Honestly I think its the other way around, you have to be big enough to hire a lawyer to enforce your copyright, and the bigger you are, the more / better lawyers you can get. Mickey Mouse and Disney are the ur-counterexample here. > The only model possible is some donation based scheme which doesn’t work for high capital investment projects. Without patents companies keep everything a trade secret. There’s a lot of stuff in the modern world that would not exist in this one and a lot of people that make their money creating things that could not do so without IP law. Perhaps we would be better off without all of this. > Is copyright and patent law broken from first principles or in conflict with useful incentive structure in society? No. Hard disagree. Yes it is.

ggrrhh_ta 6y ago

Sincerely, most of my life, me and most people around me have been ecstatic to create and share until we grew up and were drown into the collective dream of the possibility of getting rich (or at least getting by) by creating for money. And if you go to places were people are still not yet slaves to themselves - and you don't have to travel too far, just in the countryside, small islands in Europe, etc., you will see that people create and create continuously and ingenuously without ever thinking of copyrighting/trademarking/patenting. If you can't believe it, well, that's OK - I find it kind of sad, because I have experienced that and I do experience that and it is beautiful. But thinking that copyright actually incentivizes people to create is also fine - maybe it does for other subset of people.