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There Are No Good Arguments for Intellectual Property (2010)

66 points by breck 6y ago

aeoleonn 6y ago
I wonder how the author would feel about me copying & pasting their article to a few different websites (such as Medium.com), and then collecting both the financial proceeds & the credit.
- foobarbecue 6y ago
  Seems quite clear that the author would encourage that and be glad of it. There's a CC0 license at the bottom.
  - warkdarrior 6y ago
    Apparently the license the author chose requires attribution. I am assuming that their stance against IP rights means that they are willing to forego attribution.
    - ben-schaaf 6y ago
      CC0 doesn't require attribution, it's effectively public domain.
- JimDabell 6y ago
  At the bottom of the page: > To the extent possible under law, Stephan Kinsella has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to C4SIF. This work is published from: United States. In the event the CC0 license is unenforceable a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License is hereby granted.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- aeoleonn 6y ago
  lol @ three downvotes for asking a question relevant to the article Ahh HN & tech world, so many snowflakes
allturtles 6y ago
This post is really low quality. The author has made no serious effort to articulate the arguments in favor of intellectual property.
samatman 6y ago
The argument for patents is simple and clear: the alternative is broader use of trade secrets. In a patent regime, a company can (indeed must) publish their process, in exchange for a temporary monopoly on exploiting it commercially. In return, everyone else can learn it, implement it for research, and improve it, at which point the patent no longer applies. Copyright was also compelling in the technological milieu in which it was invented. Without it, the profit earned on a piece of writing goes entirely to the publisher, which is exploitative. I'm of the opinion that zero-cost copying has punctured this pretty thoroughly, and that the ludicrous extension of the term of copyright has further undermined the justice of the practice. If given a choice between the IP laws we have, and no IP laws at all, I'd take the latter. But these arguments for patents and copyright aren't some clever thing I came up with: they're the basic justification for that area of law, and they always have been. The author is simply being disingenuous.
- chalst 6y ago
  I broadly agree, but various classes of IP law collide in an ugly way in software: - the source code can be kept a trade secret and enjoy copyright protection at the same time - the object code used to be unable to be hidden (+), but it derived copyright from being a derived work (via compilation) of the source - the technology can be covered by patents. Since the object code is incomprehensible, there is no assurance that competitors will be able to figure out which patents it implements, so they become like legal landmines deterring innovation. (+) With the advent of microservices, often no more.
- lelandbatey 6y ago
  You've rightfully pointed out that there used to be good arguments for intellectual property, arguments which definitely used to have merit since they brought our existing legal framework of intellectual property into this world. The future of intellectual property though, seems quite in doubt. I'll not re-elaborate the points made in the original article, and instead I'll state what I believe the future will actually look like: The future of getting paid is going to be in "payment for genesis" not "payment for control". This means a return to patronage and a return to paying for things which can only ever be inherently temporary, such as a live performance of music. In the long-long term, as we're going to see piracy rise once more in the face of ever-fractured streaming services we'll probably see the world of "payment for control" be further and further cannibalized, eventually seeing a greater and greater shift by artists (across most all media) towards funding sources that (right now) look like Patreon and its ilk. We're already seeing these changes, and I think the future will only see these accelerate.
imtringued 6y ago
There is a certain amount of demand for intellectual property, it clearly has a reason to exist. The problem is that it is completely inflexible. There are entities that "need" 100 years of copyright, but the vast majority don't. The government is forcing a one size fits all solution designed for special interests at the expense of the majority. That's where the problem lies.
reissbaker 6y ago
medicine have been produced for ages without IP law Er... I think there's a fairly sizable difference between modern medicine, in which we can develop an effective cure for a pandemic within a year of the pandemic starting, and historical medicine in which the Black Death ravaged countries for years and was never cured, only adapted to after countless lives were lost. I don't think the modern medical industry would work without IP law. You can maybe first-principles your way to an idea of a way to produce large amounts of novel, working medicine quickly without IP law, but that's at best theorycrafting and doesn't have a whole lot of evidence backing it up AFAIK. I'm not sure how many people would dedicate their lives to coming up with new medicines, funding enormous safety and efficacy trials, and publishing results if anyone could turn around and copy their work after they poured so much into it. IP law has probably extended too far into software, but I think the argument for its use in medicine is fairly decent.
- ruined 6y ago
  the covid vaccine was not developed for profit, it was developed because the alternative was the literal end of the world as we know it. they'd been sitting on the tech for thirty years because it was not profitable, in fact https://www.salon.com/2021/01/24/the-hero-biochemist-who-pioneered-covid-vaccine-tech-was-professionally-spurned-for-years-prior/ https://www.salon.com/2021/01/24/the-hero-biochemist-who-pio... and now that it's finished it's immediately applicable to all kinds of diseases that currently and historically have generated massive amounts of damage but were also not profitable to prevent. including but not limited to hiv, malaria, and a number of cancers https://academictimes.com/first-vaccine-to-fully-immunize-against-malaria-builds-on-pandemic-driven-rna-tech/ https://academictimes.com/first-vaccine-to-fully-immunize-ag... https://www.fiercebiotech.com/research/biontech-ceo-turns-covid-19-vaccine-s-mrna-tech-against-multiple-sclerosis https://www.fiercebiotech.com/research/biontech-ceo-turns-co... https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6525/145 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6525/145 https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/11/moderna-is-developing-three-new-mrna-based-vaccines-for-seasonal-flu-hiv-and-nipah-virus/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/11/moderna-is-developing-thre... https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/covid-19-scientist-mrna-cancer-1.5956150 https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/covid-19-scientist-mrna-cance... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32716975/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32716975/ https://phys.org/news/2021-02-mrna-vaccine-cancer-immunotherapy.html https://phys.org/news/2021-02-mrna-vaccine-cancer-immunother... i would suggest you've simply picked a bad example to make your point but there are quite a lot of bad examples. medicine is invented because humans don't like to suffer, or see others suffer. property and profit don't have much to do with that beyond being the current framework to get things manufactured and keep researchers from becoming destitute. and they don't seem to be serving that function well.
newyankee 6y ago
If humanity needs to solve broader problems like climate change, poverty etc. global reformation of IP laws is must. This is the only way global south can afford some new tech and increase adoption. However the dirty secret is no country or institution will willingly give up whatever it considers its competitive advantage, as simple as that.
giansegato 6y ago
There are many things that bear little sense in the absolute, but are a pillar of the world we live in. IP rights are one of them. The part that strikes me the most is the following: "proponents of IP say that without it we wouldn't have movies and medicine, but we had both for centuries without IP". That's just false. True, we had art in the Past, but it was a different time: in the Middle Age everything was the King's property, and before him, God's. The critical point is that the business model was different: we relied on rich families to cover the costs. Dante's Commedia was covered by the pockets of the Lords of Ravenna (and the Church). Virgil? Covered by the pockets of Maecenas (and Augustus). Wanna have democracy and equality? Capitalism is the only business model proven capable of sustaining that. Same goes for medicine, that by the way never reached any meaningful scale before science, IP and capitalism came along. The author seems less interested in getting the facts right and more interested in pushing forward their political point of view.
- neilwilson 6y ago
  "Same goes for medicine, that by the way never reached any meaningful scale before science, IP and capitalism came along." How did the Oxford/Astrazeneca vaccine come about, and at the low price that it did? By Fiscal Activism by the UK government. That's how basic science, research and development comes about - by government fiscal activism making the results freely available. Once that breaches a risk threshold the private sector will jump on it and accelerate the innovation from it. The existence of the Internet shows the power of that approach.
  - mousepilot 6y ago
    I think we can still have intellectual property rights even in this context. Some things are worth working on at a national level, like the vaccine, but that doesn't have to be an argument in abolishing all IP rights. We don't have to nationalize pop music for instance, heck it doesn't even make sense to do this.
imwillofficial 6y ago
With a headline like that, we can just close up shop and move on, no thinking needed! All joking aside, how did something like that make it to the front page?
- chalst 6y ago
  Best not read on, else you might encounter reasoning like "[These arguments] are all flawed, since libertarianism is right". Well, it is the Von Mises blog...
- eightails 6y ago
  Yeah you're not alone in wondering that. I was expecting more substance to this article, not just single-sentence responses to a few straw-manned arguments.
EGreg 6y ago
You cant prove a negative !
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
gammalost 6y ago
>libertarianism is right Says who, you? Treating that as some kind of axiom makes everything else a terrible argument
dragonwriter 6y ago
The arguments for IP (and intangible personal property more generally) are the same as for property in general: giving those who take action which produces value exclusive rights in the value producing thing promotes development of value which benefits the community. That’s not to say I don’t understand the arguments for generally more limited property rights, but I find right-libertarian, generally property-rights-maximalists, arguing against IP to be…well, not actually surprising given that that faction generally has a fairly arbitrary deontological [0] conception of property rights. [0] That is, the specific parameters of property rights are fairly directly axiomatic rather than something rationally grounded in a simpler set of general principles.
- cturner 6y ago
  “action which produces value exclusive rights...” This does not describe “property in general”. (Also, it is gobbledegook.) The concept of property (excluding ip) is extremely straightforward - control of something scarce. Things called IP are not inherently scarce, and the arguments used to justify it are plainly not the same.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > “action which produces value exclusive rights...” This does not describe “property in general”. (Also, it is gobbledegook.) Yes, in isolation that excerpt which cuts across parts of different phrases from the middle of a sentence is gobbledygook which describes nothing. Other than being a good illustration of why sentences are meaningful units but arbitrarily selected excerpts from the middle of them are not, I’m not sure what your point is.
aaron695 6y ago
There's zero substance to this is quick blog. > artworks and medicine have been produced for ages without IP law; This is bullshit. What are they even talking about? I think medicine and movies/art and IP were invented around the same time. Last 100 may be 200 years years. In our 100,000 year history that links them pretty well. Wikipedia - "The modern concept of intellectual property developed in England in the 17th and 18th centuries" That's obviously older than medicine. Are they including leaches and prayer and birth control which is just a light dose of poison? Well good luck to their world were you die at 40 and art is a few shitty books you'll never get to read. I assume they build on other crappy (10 year old) blogs and think living in the old days was amazing where everyone lived to 90, because the 'infants' died young that they had such a low life expectancy and everyone had split sleeps and short work days. Lots of countries have little enforcement of Intellectual Property. What are their living conditions like? How many good local movies do they make? (And if you say Nollywood, you have to explain how it's not just a gangsta related flex)
- chayleaf 6y ago
  It's hard to distinguish correlation from causation. If a country imports more IP than it exports, then enforcing IP laws quite clearly bleeds money from it. If citizens spend money on local non-IP industries instead of foreign IPs, the country has more money. But if the local IP industry is strong enough, it can bring money from other countries, and local IP enforcement can help support the industry that brings potential foreign money inflow. That is, assuming IP "enforcement" increases money spent on IP, which isn't always the case.
- dmitriid 6y ago
  This comment is the single most compelling argument why STEM must include liberal arts/humanities studies
  - aaron695 6y ago
    You will find most STEM people do 'liberal arts/humanities studies' because it reduces our workload and gets us high distinctions. I got trouble because they saw me 'hacking' the system a bit working them in.
slver 6y ago
Nobody would invest billions in IP if someone from the street can walk by and take it.Is that such a complex subject to understand? IP is not a different concept than property. People like to say "you can't actually steal IP, you get to keep yours". Of course you can steal IP, by using it or redistributing it without compensating the creator, you reduce the value of their IP. You stole from them by taking part of the value of the IP for yourself, robbing THEM from having it. Scenario: an inventor invests 10 million for a product and makes 20 million in sales. He goes to invest the 10 million profit in his next invention. Alternate scenario: an inventor invests 10 million for a product and makes 1 million in sales, because competitors use his IP for free and saturated the market. Inventor goes bankrupt. Call it anything you want, but to me the competitors stole $19 million from the inventor. Yes, we can't predict the future, so it's harder to argue hypothetical situations. But seriously can't we put 2+2 together? Plus IP expires. It's not like patents and so on forever stay the property if someone. Eventually they become available to everyone in all their documented and archived glory at the patent office.
- lordnacho 6y ago
  That's only one side of the story. The other side is someone gets a patent, doesn't build a thing that people can buy, and just tries to get money off someone who does want to do that. People who are looking at making this thing then get scared of investing in the development of the product and then we're back to no investment. I've literally seen this with my own eyes. A friend of mine is one of these guys who has a 3D printer and thinks about what to invent all day. He also spends a lot of time looking up patents and tosses out ideas that he thinks will cause a legal mess. It's a shame because I think we might be at a point where we need more people executing than dreaming up ideas.
- jayd16 6y ago
  What you fail to understand is that investment in IP is not the goal, so saying it would no longer be invested in is non-convincing. You have to actually prove that research would slow down but your hypothetical scenarios are not proof. I can just as easily assert that investment and research would happen with or without temporary exclusive legal rights as. Market forces still push for improvement even without exclusivity.
sdesalas 6y ago
While i agree that property rights are usually excessive, i doubt the author has ever spent hours crafting their own artwork and had someone use it for their advertising without the courtesy of asking.
ncmncm 6y ago
Lost me in the first paragraph. There probably are legitimate arguments against IP (and patents and copyright are explicitly not property, anyway -- the whole field of law is dishonest to the core) but I know at the outset I won't find them here.
ajuc 6y ago
IP is designed to preserve the status quo - for rich countries to remain rich and for poor countries to remain poor. That's why every country that successfully moved from poor to rich - did so by ignoring patents and other forms of IP. Philosophical arguments make no difference, money talk. If you're poor you can't get rich without using other people's IP for free. So you will. If you're rich you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by supporting strict IP laws - so you will.
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Gehinnn 6y ago
The approval of a patent registration request should work like this: The issuer provides a public description of the problem the patent solves and a secret description of the solution. They pay $10k in advance to request a patent registration. The patent institution then publishes the public problem description. External challengers can submit additional solutions for $100. After some time (e.g. a month) submission closes and independent judges need to identify the solution proposed by the patent issuer out of all submitted solutions. If they succeed, the patent will be registered. Otherwise, the submitter of the identified solution gets a split of the patent registration fee (e.g. $2k) and registration is denied. The institution manages hundreds of possible judges, only a few are selected randomly by a trusted computer. If a selected judge correctly identifies the solution of the patent, they will get a bonus (more than challengers would get, e.g. $3k). Non-selected judges can submit challenging solutions. This should be robust against bribery and prevent low effort bullshit patents!? If a company wants to bribe judges, they need to identify the selected judges, otherwise they help not-selected judges to submit challenging solutions. This can be made very hard. Also, the solution of the patent should solve a hard problem (i.e. a problem that is hard to find solutions for). Otherwise, challengers can easily come up with solutions of equivalent quality. If the problem is "A mechanism to visually indicate progress", it should not be too hard to come up with the progress bar.
- staticassertion 6y ago
  > They pay like $10k to test their patent. Cool, so patents are (even more so) for rich people exclusively. Also, what you're describing soudns a lot like the existing system to me, but with more upfront money.
  - Gehinnn 6y ago
    How can ordinary people challenge patent registrations in a fair way? It is easy to claim that a solution is trivial, but it is almost impossible to prove that if you know the solution already. Feel free to adapt the sums I listed, that would not change the procedure. I do think that there should be a decent financial burden to protect an idea though. If your idea is good, you can still borrow money (or split patent revenue with investors).
goatinaboat 6y ago
Summary: all my inputs should be free and I should be paid 6 or even 7 figures for sticking them together
hilbert42 6y ago
"There are No Good Arguments for Intellectual Property" Oh yes there are! As Cory Doctorow has suggested, the average person couldn't care less about intellectual property/copyright, and this has always been so. Thus, you're never going to see people out demonstrating on the street over it. The argument for intellectual property is that with most of the population AWOL over the matter, the few who do care are free to lobby politicians to strengthen IP and then proceed to rip us off with even further impunity. And I'm sure they consider our collective ambivalence a damn good argument for keeping it.

66 points by breck 6y ago

I wonder how the author would feel about me copying & pasting their article to a few different websites (such as Medium.com), and then collecting both the financial proceeds & the credit.

foobarbecue 6y ago
Seems quite clear that the author would encourage that and be glad of it. There's a CC0 license at the bottom.
- warkdarrior 6y ago
  Apparently the license the author chose requires attribution. I am assuming that their stance against IP rights means that they are willing to forego attribution.
  - ben-schaaf 6y ago
    CC0 doesn't require attribution, it's effectively public domain.
JimDabell 6y ago
At the bottom of the page: > To the extent possible under law, Stephan Kinsella has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to C4SIF. This work is published from: United States. In the event the CC0 license is unenforceable a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License is hereby granted.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
aeoleonn 6y ago
lol @ three downvotes for asking a question relevant to the article Ahh HN & tech world, so many snowflakes

allturtles 6y ago

This post is really low quality. The author has made no serious effort to articulate the arguments in favor of intellectual property.

samatman 6y ago

The argument for patents is simple and clear: the alternative is broader use of trade secrets. In a patent regime, a company can (indeed must) publish their process, in exchange for a temporary monopoly on exploiting it commercially. In return, everyone else can learn it, implement it for research, and improve it, at which point the patent no longer applies. Copyright was also compelling in the technological milieu in which it was invented. Without it, the profit earned on a piece of writing goes entirely to the publisher, which is exploitative. I'm of the opinion that zero-cost copying has punctured this pretty thoroughly, and that the ludicrous extension of the term of copyright has further undermined the justice of the practice. If given a choice between the IP laws we have, and no IP laws at all, I'd take the latter. But these arguments for patents and copyright aren't some clever thing I came up with: they're the basic justification for that area of law, and they always have been. The author is simply being disingenuous.

chalst 6y ago
I broadly agree, but various classes of IP law collide in an ugly way in software: - the source code can be kept a trade secret and enjoy copyright protection at the same time - the object code used to be unable to be hidden (+), but it derived copyright from being a derived work (via compilation) of the source - the technology can be covered by patents. Since the object code is incomprehensible, there is no assurance that competitors will be able to figure out which patents it implements, so they become like legal landmines deterring innovation. (+) With the advent of microservices, often no more.
lelandbatey 6y ago
You've rightfully pointed out that there used to be good arguments for intellectual property, arguments which definitely used to have merit since they brought our existing legal framework of intellectual property into this world. The future of intellectual property though, seems quite in doubt. I'll not re-elaborate the points made in the original article, and instead I'll state what I believe the future will actually look like: The future of getting paid is going to be in "payment for genesis" not "payment for control". This means a return to patronage and a return to paying for things which can only ever be inherently temporary, such as a live performance of music. In the long-long term, as we're going to see piracy rise once more in the face of ever-fractured streaming services we'll probably see the world of "payment for control" be further and further cannibalized, eventually seeing a greater and greater shift by artists (across most all media) towards funding sources that (right now) look like Patreon and its ilk. We're already seeing these changes, and I think the future will only see these accelerate.

imtringued 6y ago

There is a certain amount of demand for intellectual property, it clearly has a reason to exist. The problem is that it is completely inflexible. There are entities that "need" 100 years of copyright, but the vast majority don't. The government is forcing a one size fits all solution designed for special interests at the expense of the majority. That's where the problem lies.

reissbaker 6y ago

medicine have been produced for ages without IP law Er... I think there's a fairly sizable difference between modern medicine, in which we can develop an effective cure for a pandemic within a year of the pandemic starting, and historical medicine in which the Black Death ravaged countries for years and was never cured, only adapted to after countless lives were lost. I don't think the modern medical industry would work without IP law. You can maybe first-principles your way to an idea of a way to produce large amounts of novel, working medicine quickly without IP law, but that's at best theorycrafting and doesn't have a whole lot of evidence backing it up AFAIK. I'm not sure how many people would dedicate their lives to coming up with new medicines, funding enormous safety and efficacy trials, and publishing results if anyone could turn around and copy their work after they poured so much into it. IP law has probably extended too far into software, but I think the argument for its use in medicine is fairly decent.

ruined 6y ago
the covid vaccine was not developed for profit, it was developed because the alternative was the literal end of the world as we know it. they'd been sitting on the tech for thirty years because it was not profitable, in fact https://www.salon.com/2021/01/24/the-hero-biochemist-who-pioneered-covid-vaccine-tech-was-professionally-spurned-for-years-prior/ https://www.salon.com/2021/01/24/the-hero-biochemist-who-pio... and now that it's finished it's immediately applicable to all kinds of diseases that currently and historically have generated massive amounts of damage but were also not profitable to prevent. including but not limited to hiv, malaria, and a number of cancers https://academictimes.com/first-vaccine-to-fully-immunize-against-malaria-builds-on-pandemic-driven-rna-tech/ https://academictimes.com/first-vaccine-to-fully-immunize-ag... https://www.fiercebiotech.com/research/biontech-ceo-turns-covid-19-vaccine-s-mrna-tech-against-multiple-sclerosis https://www.fiercebiotech.com/research/biontech-ceo-turns-co... https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6525/145 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6525/145 https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/11/moderna-is-developing-three-new-mrna-based-vaccines-for-seasonal-flu-hiv-and-nipah-virus/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/11/moderna-is-developing-thre... https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/covid-19-scientist-mrna-cancer-1.5956150 https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/covid-19-scientist-mrna-cance... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32716975/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32716975/ https://phys.org/news/2021-02-mrna-vaccine-cancer-immunotherapy.html https://phys.org/news/2021-02-mrna-vaccine-cancer-immunother... i would suggest you've simply picked a bad example to make your point but there are quite a lot of bad examples. medicine is invented because humans don't like to suffer, or see others suffer. property and profit don't have much to do with that beyond being the current framework to get things manufactured and keep researchers from becoming destitute. and they don't seem to be serving that function well.

newyankee 6y ago

If humanity needs to solve broader problems like climate change, poverty etc. global reformation of IP laws is must. This is the only way global south can afford some new tech and increase adoption. However the dirty secret is no country or institution will willingly give up whatever it considers its competitive advantage, as simple as that.

giansegato 6y ago

There are many things that bear little sense in the absolute, but are a pillar of the world we live in. IP rights are one of them. The part that strikes me the most is the following: "proponents of IP say that without it we wouldn't have movies and medicine, but we had both for centuries without IP". That's just false. True, we had art in the Past, but it was a different time: in the Middle Age everything was the King's property, and before him, God's. The critical point is that the business model was different: we relied on rich families to cover the costs. Dante's Commedia was covered by the pockets of the Lords of Ravenna (and the Church). Virgil? Covered by the pockets of Maecenas (and Augustus). Wanna have democracy and equality? Capitalism is the only business model proven capable of sustaining that. Same goes for medicine, that by the way never reached any meaningful scale before science, IP and capitalism came along. The author seems less interested in getting the facts right and more interested in pushing forward their political point of view.

neilwilson 6y ago
"Same goes for medicine, that by the way never reached any meaningful scale before science, IP and capitalism came along." How did the Oxford/Astrazeneca vaccine come about, and at the low price that it did? By Fiscal Activism by the UK government. That's how basic science, research and development comes about - by government fiscal activism making the results freely available. Once that breaches a risk threshold the private sector will jump on it and accelerate the innovation from it. The existence of the Internet shows the power of that approach.
- mousepilot 6y ago
  I think we can still have intellectual property rights even in this context. Some things are worth working on at a national level, like the vaccine, but that doesn't have to be an argument in abolishing all IP rights. We don't have to nationalize pop music for instance, heck it doesn't even make sense to do this.

imwillofficial 6y ago

With a headline like that, we can just close up shop and move on, no thinking needed! All joking aside, how did something like that make it to the front page?

chalst 6y ago
Best not read on, else you might encounter reasoning like "[These arguments] are all flawed, since libertarianism is right". Well, it is the Von Mises blog...
eightails 6y ago
Yeah you're not alone in wondering that. I was expecting more substance to this article, not just single-sentence responses to a few straw-manned arguments.

EGreg 6y ago

You cant prove a negative !

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

gammalost 6y ago

>libertarianism is right Says who, you? Treating that as some kind of axiom makes everything else a terrible argument

dragonwriter 6y ago

The arguments for IP (and intangible personal property more generally) are the same as for property in general: giving those who take action which produces value exclusive rights in the value producing thing promotes development of value which benefits the community. That’s not to say I don’t understand the arguments for generally more limited property rights, but I find right-libertarian, generally property-rights-maximalists, arguing against IP to be…well, not actually surprising given that that faction generally has a fairly arbitrary deontological [0] conception of property rights. [0] That is, the specific parameters of property rights are fairly directly axiomatic rather than something rationally grounded in a simpler set of general principles.

cturner 6y ago
“action which produces value exclusive rights...” This does not describe “property in general”. (Also, it is gobbledegook.) The concept of property (excluding ip) is extremely straightforward - control of something scarce. Things called IP are not inherently scarce, and the arguments used to justify it are plainly not the same.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > “action which produces value exclusive rights...” This does not describe “property in general”. (Also, it is gobbledegook.) Yes, in isolation that excerpt which cuts across parts of different phrases from the middle of a sentence is gobbledygook which describes nothing. Other than being a good illustration of why sentences are meaningful units but arbitrarily selected excerpts from the middle of them are not, I’m not sure what your point is.

aaron695 6y ago

There's zero substance to this is quick blog. > artworks and medicine have been produced for ages without IP law; This is bullshit. What are they even talking about? I think medicine and movies/art and IP were invented around the same time. Last 100 may be 200 years years. In our 100,000 year history that links them pretty well. Wikipedia - "The modern concept of intellectual property developed in England in the 17th and 18th centuries" That's obviously older than medicine. Are they including leaches and prayer and birth control which is just a light dose of poison? Well good luck to their world were you die at 40 and art is a few shitty books you'll never get to read. I assume they build on other crappy (10 year old) blogs and think living in the old days was amazing where everyone lived to 90, because the 'infants' died young that they had such a low life expectancy and everyone had split sleeps and short work days. Lots of countries have little enforcement of Intellectual Property. What are their living conditions like? How many good local movies do they make? (And if you say Nollywood, you have to explain how it's not just a gangsta related flex)

chayleaf 6y ago
It's hard to distinguish correlation from causation. If a country imports more IP than it exports, then enforcing IP laws quite clearly bleeds money from it. If citizens spend money on local non-IP industries instead of foreign IPs, the country has more money. But if the local IP industry is strong enough, it can bring money from other countries, and local IP enforcement can help support the industry that brings potential foreign money inflow. That is, assuming IP "enforcement" increases money spent on IP, which isn't always the case.
dmitriid 6y ago
This comment is the single most compelling argument why STEM must include liberal arts/humanities studies
- aaron695 6y ago
  You will find most STEM people do 'liberal arts/humanities studies' because it reduces our workload and gets us high distinctions. I got trouble because they saw me 'hacking' the system a bit working them in.

slver 6y ago

Nobody would invest billions in IP if someone from the street can walk by and take it.Is that such a complex subject to understand? IP is not a different concept than property. People like to say "you can't actually steal IP, you get to keep yours". Of course you can steal IP, by using it or redistributing it without compensating the creator, you reduce the value of their IP. You stole from them by taking part of the value of the IP for yourself, robbing THEM from having it. Scenario: an inventor invests 10 million for a product and makes 20 million in sales. He goes to invest the 10 million profit in his next invention. Alternate scenario: an inventor invests 10 million for a product and makes 1 million in sales, because competitors use his IP for free and saturated the market. Inventor goes bankrupt. Call it anything you want, but to me the competitors stole $19 million from the inventor. Yes, we can't predict the future, so it's harder to argue hypothetical situations. But seriously can't we put 2+2 together? Plus IP expires. It's not like patents and so on forever stay the property if someone. Eventually they become available to everyone in all their documented and archived glory at the patent office.

lordnacho 6y ago
That's only one side of the story. The other side is someone gets a patent, doesn't build a thing that people can buy, and just tries to get money off someone who does want to do that. People who are looking at making this thing then get scared of investing in the development of the product and then we're back to no investment. I've literally seen this with my own eyes. A friend of mine is one of these guys who has a 3D printer and thinks about what to invent all day. He also spends a lot of time looking up patents and tosses out ideas that he thinks will cause a legal mess. It's a shame because I think we might be at a point where we need more people executing than dreaming up ideas.
jayd16 6y ago
What you fail to understand is that investment in IP is not the goal, so saying it would no longer be invested in is non-convincing. You have to actually prove that research would slow down but your hypothetical scenarios are not proof. I can just as easily assert that investment and research would happen with or without temporary exclusive legal rights as. Market forces still push for improvement even without exclusivity.

sdesalas 6y ago

While i agree that property rights are usually excessive, i doubt the author has ever spent hours crafting their own artwork and had someone use it for their advertising without the courtesy of asking.

ncmncm 6y ago

Lost me in the first paragraph. There probably are legitimate arguments against IP (and patents and copyright are explicitly not property, anyway -- the whole field of law is dishonest to the core) but I know at the outset I won't find them here.

ajuc 6y ago

IP is designed to preserve the status quo - for rich countries to remain rich and for poor countries to remain poor. That's why every country that successfully moved from poor to rich - did so by ignoring patents and other forms of IP. Philosophical arguments make no difference, money talk. If you're poor you can't get rich without using other people's IP for free. So you will. If you're rich you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by supporting strict IP laws - so you will.

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Gehinnn 6y ago

The approval of a patent registration request should work like this: The issuer provides a public description of the problem the patent solves and a secret description of the solution. They pay $10k in advance to request a patent registration. The patent institution then publishes the public problem description. External challengers can submit additional solutions for $100. After some time (e.g. a month) submission closes and independent judges need to identify the solution proposed by the patent issuer out of all submitted solutions. If they succeed, the patent will be registered. Otherwise, the submitter of the identified solution gets a split of the patent registration fee (e.g. $2k) and registration is denied. The institution manages hundreds of possible judges, only a few are selected randomly by a trusted computer. If a selected judge correctly identifies the solution of the patent, they will get a bonus (more than challengers would get, e.g. $3k). Non-selected judges can submit challenging solutions. This should be robust against bribery and prevent low effort bullshit patents!? If a company wants to bribe judges, they need to identify the selected judges, otherwise they help not-selected judges to submit challenging solutions. This can be made very hard. Also, the solution of the patent should solve a hard problem (i.e. a problem that is hard to find solutions for). Otherwise, challengers can easily come up with solutions of equivalent quality. If the problem is "A mechanism to visually indicate progress", it should not be too hard to come up with the progress bar.

staticassertion 6y ago
> They pay like $10k to test their patent. Cool, so patents are (even more so) for rich people exclusively. Also, what you're describing soudns a lot like the existing system to me, but with more upfront money.
- Gehinnn 6y ago
  How can ordinary people challenge patent registrations in a fair way? It is easy to claim that a solution is trivial, but it is almost impossible to prove that if you know the solution already. Feel free to adapt the sums I listed, that would not change the procedure. I do think that there should be a decent financial burden to protect an idea though. If your idea is good, you can still borrow money (or split patent revenue with investors).

goatinaboat 6y ago

Summary: all my inputs should be free and I should be paid 6 or even 7 figures for sticking them together

hilbert42 6y ago

"There are No Good Arguments for Intellectual Property" Oh yes there are! As Cory Doctorow has suggested, the average person couldn't care less about intellectual property/copyright, and this has always been so. Thus, you're never going to see people out demonstrating on the street over it. The argument for intellectual property is that with most of the population AWOL over the matter, the few who do care are free to lobby politicians to strengthen IP and then proceed to rip us off with even further impunity. And I'm sure they consider our collective ambivalence a damn good argument for keeping it.