5 ms·

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 concep

by 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.
- slver 6y ago
  Research the origins of IP. IP didn't exist forever. It was introduced because it was needed. If you think this is subjective, let me ask you think: you have a popular YouTube channel, your content requires paying writers, actors, VFX teams and editors. Bunch of other people copy your content freely and legally and get most of the ad revenue. You protest: you made this content, you paid for it. Please just link to me, not the copycats. Response "we can just as easily assert that you'd continue making videos anyway with or without other people copying you." Kind of tonedeaf isn't it? Look, eventually all our jobs will be producing IP. We'll have IP schematics to prints 3D printers which prints other 3D printers, which print robots which do all the work. I'm simplifying but basically that's the future of jobs. No one cares about your muscles, they only care about your brain. So, to say IP deserves no rights in the long-term means basically no one has jobs, and we have no economy.
  - saithound 6y ago
    Your hypothetical scenario is silly: it relies on the dubious assumption that neither YouTube nor the viewers have any agency about who they give money to. The agency of the viewers was discussed in the other responses, so let's focus on the agency of YouTube. Why would YouTube pay ad revenue to a "bunch of other people" in a hypothetical world where YouTube could freely and legally host a copy of the content themselves, and take all the ad revenue for themselves? They have an incentive to pay something the creator (if they think that doing so would motivate them to create more content, and hence lead to more ad revenue in the future), but certainly not to a bunch of random people uploading the same content.
    - slver 6y ago
      Your argument in favor of YouTube protecting IP rights basically applies 1:1 about the government protecting it. You do realize if YouTube alone protected copyright, we'd have a NotYouTube clone setup within minutes where the copies and ads will go to, or not? We have governments for this stuff, so we don't have to play whack-a-mole with copycats all over the internet and the world.
wiz21c 6y ago
> Nobody would invest billions in IP if someone from the street can walk by and take it. Gross simplification. The simple fact you reason and write about this question is a direct consuequence of the free availability of IP to you : you learned to write, to compute, to think with books and a free incredibly huge flow of ideas. You're basically seeing intellectual production as a thing that should be monetized. Most of IP is free fortunately. > Plus IP expires. Unless armies of legal teams make sure it doesn't. I'm always surprised by the fact that many people advocate for free competing markets. But if you remove IP, then it's totally free competition : nobody gets the protection of IP, all players are on the same page. Then all of sudden "investors" don't want to invest anymore because there's not protection. Either those are not very brave, either they're not interested in making the world a better plus but rather interested in winning money because, hey we had a great idea, we _deserve_ to profit on it...
- esyir 6y ago
  So, people will dump in the billions of dollars of investment developing drugs and getting them past human trials, only to have them immediately be stolen? Removal of IP here means that you've enforced a penalty against innovators and creators, and baked incentives for grifting and leeching straight into the system. The system we have right now is flawed, but the remove all IP argument is even worse. I'll also pre-empt the "But research is government funded" side tangent, getting the drug from a proof of concept/academic study to something that can actually be used is horrendously expensive, and this bit is completely in the domain of private industry. And if you think academia is going to replace that in this no-IP world, you might want to look into how the academia -> industry pipeline actually works. On a more software side angle, I've found it interesting that the biggest anti-IP people I know also bemoan the general move over to SaaS.
  - hi_im_miles 6y ago
    The flaw with this argument is the assumption that incentives cannot exist towards innovation without IP protections. It's obvious why investors will seldomly invest in non-protected innovation: monopolies are just significantly more lucrative. Absent that incentive, are there no truly no alternatives? Was this assumption ever tested prior to these policies being implemented? I think it's also worth asking why the available funding for innovation is almost exclusively in the hands of capitalists in the first place. Do they simply have superior business acumen, or are there protections / rent-seeking behaviors at play here?
cturner 6y ago
“Of course you can steal ip ... you reduce the value of their ip”. This is a circular argument, and invalid. Then default state is for ip to have no value. The only thing that gives it value is far-reaching laws that diminish the real property rights of anyone who owns a pen or hard disk. The existence of those laws cannot be an argument in favour of those laws.
- slver 6y ago
  By that same logic, why have property rights at all? You invest to produce IP, to you this still results in "IP has no value by default". So I guess investing to buy a house, also results in "this house has no value by default" by that same logic.
  - cturner 6y ago
    Scarce things have limited use.
    - slver 6y ago
      ?
      - cturner 6y ago
        Once you have eaten an apple, it cannot be eaten again. If you plant a crop of wheat on your field this season, your brother cannot also plant a crop of barley there. When you ride your bicycle to work for the day, your neighbour cannot ride the same bicycle to the gym at midday. The quality of scarceness does not come from law, it is inherent. Through owning your house, you get to decide what goes on there and have the use of it. IP does not work that way because there is no inherent scarcity. A million and one people can listen to the same music track, and the first listener loses no value from its use by the other million.
        slver 6y ago
        It's full of empty houses and free land over the entire country. If I live alone in a big house with 5 rooms, I could host at least 10-15 people there. They would surely rather live in that nice house, and not on the street. What causes that scarcity that I live alone in a big house, while homeless people roam the streets? Property rights. Property rights cause scarcity way before "natural scarcity" kicks in. To think otherwise is to lie to yourself. The reason we can't rely just on natural scarcity is because it reduces us to living like animals. Rights protection, in balance, is what allows society to rise above a pile of people consuming everything to scarcity and filling everything to capacity, with no ability to take a long-term view other mere existence.
pasabagi 6y ago
> Nobody would invest billions in IP if someone from the street can walk by and take it. That's called a university. Such institutions are responsible for the vast majority of technical advances.
zby 6y ago
That falls under point 5 - no real evidence, just thought experiments. I don't really agree with that argument - 'real evidence' is always elusive - at some point we always have to do thought experiments - but I think you need to go a bit deeper. Your examples assume the business model of current copy right related businesses - it is obvious that in a world without copy rights they would not function, but that does not mean that we would not get the things that those businesses produce - they could be produced in other business models.
RobertoG 6y ago
That argument it's not the reason why IP exist. The justification is that IP will create more value for society through incentives, not that the inventor would loss value. Otherwise you could justify eternal IP. So, the only defense for IP is "it creates more value for society than the alternative". If we look into it, and the alternative is better (I don't know), the inventor should loss their privileges. IP is not a right, it's a monopoly, a privilege given by law, and can be changed by law if judged not convenient anymore.

by slver 6y ago

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.

slver 6y ago
Research the origins of IP. IP didn't exist forever. It was introduced because it was needed. If you think this is subjective, let me ask you think: you have a popular YouTube channel, your content requires paying writers, actors, VFX teams and editors. Bunch of other people copy your content freely and legally and get most of the ad revenue. You protest: you made this content, you paid for it. Please just link to me, not the copycats. Response "we can just as easily assert that you'd continue making videos anyway with or without other people copying you." Kind of tonedeaf isn't it? Look, eventually all our jobs will be producing IP. We'll have IP schematics to prints 3D printers which prints other 3D printers, which print robots which do all the work. I'm simplifying but basically that's the future of jobs. No one cares about your muscles, they only care about your brain. So, to say IP deserves no rights in the long-term means basically no one has jobs, and we have no economy.
- saithound 6y ago
  Your hypothetical scenario is silly: it relies on the dubious assumption that neither YouTube nor the viewers have any agency about who they give money to. The agency of the viewers was discussed in the other responses, so let's focus on the agency of YouTube. Why would YouTube pay ad revenue to a "bunch of other people" in a hypothetical world where YouTube could freely and legally host a copy of the content themselves, and take all the ad revenue for themselves? They have an incentive to pay something the creator (if they think that doing so would motivate them to create more content, and hence lead to more ad revenue in the future), but certainly not to a bunch of random people uploading the same content.
  - slver 6y ago
    Your argument in favor of YouTube protecting IP rights basically applies 1:1 about the government protecting it. You do realize if YouTube alone protected copyright, we'd have a NotYouTube clone setup within minutes where the copies and ads will go to, or not? We have governments for this stuff, so we don't have to play whack-a-mole with copycats all over the internet and the world.

wiz21c 6y ago

> Nobody would invest billions in IP if someone from the street can walk by and take it. Gross simplification. The simple fact you reason and write about this question is a direct consuequence of the free availability of IP to you : you learned to write, to compute, to think with books and a free incredibly huge flow of ideas. You're basically seeing intellectual production as a thing that should be monetized. Most of IP is free fortunately. > Plus IP expires. Unless armies of legal teams make sure it doesn't. I'm always surprised by the fact that many people advocate for free competing markets. But if you remove IP, then it's totally free competition : nobody gets the protection of IP, all players are on the same page. Then all of sudden "investors" don't want to invest anymore because there's not protection. Either those are not very brave, either they're not interested in making the world a better plus but rather interested in winning money because, hey we had a great idea, we _deserve_ to profit on it...

esyir 6y ago
So, people will dump in the billions of dollars of investment developing drugs and getting them past human trials, only to have them immediately be stolen? Removal of IP here means that you've enforced a penalty against innovators and creators, and baked incentives for grifting and leeching straight into the system. The system we have right now is flawed, but the remove all IP argument is even worse. I'll also pre-empt the "But research is government funded" side tangent, getting the drug from a proof of concept/academic study to something that can actually be used is horrendously expensive, and this bit is completely in the domain of private industry. And if you think academia is going to replace that in this no-IP world, you might want to look into how the academia -> industry pipeline actually works. On a more software side angle, I've found it interesting that the biggest anti-IP people I know also bemoan the general move over to SaaS.
- hi_im_miles 6y ago
  The flaw with this argument is the assumption that incentives cannot exist towards innovation without IP protections. It's obvious why investors will seldomly invest in non-protected innovation: monopolies are just significantly more lucrative. Absent that incentive, are there no truly no alternatives? Was this assumption ever tested prior to these policies being implemented? I think it's also worth asking why the available funding for innovation is almost exclusively in the hands of capitalists in the first place. Do they simply have superior business acumen, or are there protections / rent-seeking behaviors at play here?

cturner 6y ago

“Of course you can steal ip ... you reduce the value of their ip”. This is a circular argument, and invalid. Then default state is for ip to have no value. The only thing that gives it value is far-reaching laws that diminish the real property rights of anyone who owns a pen or hard disk. The existence of those laws cannot be an argument in favour of those laws.

slver 6y ago
By that same logic, why have property rights at all? You invest to produce IP, to you this still results in "IP has no value by default". So I guess investing to buy a house, also results in "this house has no value by default" by that same logic.
- cturner 6y ago
  Scarce things have limited use.
  - slver 6y ago
    ?
    - cturner 6y ago
      Once you have eaten an apple, it cannot be eaten again. If you plant a crop of wheat on your field this season, your brother cannot also plant a crop of barley there. When you ride your bicycle to work for the day, your neighbour cannot ride the same bicycle to the gym at midday. The quality of scarceness does not come from law, it is inherent. Through owning your house, you get to decide what goes on there and have the use of it. IP does not work that way because there is no inherent scarcity. A million and one people can listen to the same music track, and the first listener loses no value from its use by the other million.
      - slver 6y ago
        It's full of empty houses and free land over the entire country. If I live alone in a big house with 5 rooms, I could host at least 10-15 people there. They would surely rather live in that nice house, and not on the street. What causes that scarcity that I live alone in a big house, while homeless people roam the streets? Property rights. Property rights cause scarcity way before "natural scarcity" kicks in. To think otherwise is to lie to yourself. The reason we can't rely just on natural scarcity is because it reduces us to living like animals. Rights protection, in balance, is what allows society to rise above a pile of people consuming everything to scarcity and filling everything to capacity, with no ability to take a long-term view other mere existence.

pasabagi 6y ago

> Nobody would invest billions in IP if someone from the street can walk by and take it. That's called a university. Such institutions are responsible for the vast majority of technical advances.

zby 6y ago

That falls under point 5 - no real evidence, just thought experiments. I don't really agree with that argument - 'real evidence' is always elusive - at some point we always have to do thought experiments - but I think you need to go a bit deeper. Your examples assume the business model of current copy right related businesses - it is obvious that in a world without copy rights they would not function, but that does not mean that we would not get the things that those businesses produce - they could be produced in other business models.

RobertoG 6y ago

That argument it's not the reason why IP exist. The justification is that IP will create more value for society through incentives, not that the inventor would loss value. Otherwise you could justify eternal IP. So, the only defense for IP is "it creates more value for society than the alternative". If we look into it, and the alternative is better (I don't know), the inventor should loss their privileges. IP is not a right, it's a monopoly, a privilege given by law, and can be changed by law if judged not convenient anymore.