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IP has always rubbed me as preoccupied with protecting a past instead of forging a future. An effective monopoly over customers should be won through superior

IP has always rubbed me as preoccupied with protecting a past instead of forging a future. An effective monopoly over customers should be won through superior products in the marketplace, not by inferior products defended in the courts. Even when it's a superior product, often covetous protectors of excessive demands and restrictions hamper and kill it. Media formats, software, vehicle technology, the graveyard of brilliant products by petty tyrants zealously destroying their dreams through their own stubbornness is vast and depressing. I'm glad Apple knocked off Xerox, Tim Berners Lee knocked off Ted Nelson, and Linus knocked off a bunch of groups. I'm glad Encyclopedia Britannica didn't have IP rights to shut down wikipedia and W3Catalog, the first search engine wasn't going around knocking off Yahoo, Alta Vista and Google when they came around. I don't expect wide agreement with this, that's why I'm saying it.

lallysingh 5y ago
Without a brand, how does the customer know who's products they're buying?
- blowski 5y ago
  Tangentially, it's fascinating how the opposite problem pops up on Amazon - how do I know I'm actually buying brand X on Amazon? Maybe the solutions to both problems are related.
  - bastawhiz 5y ago
    It's almost as though there needs to be an organization that's appointed by and accountable to citizens to hold companies accountable for maintaining integrity on these matters.
    - randallsquared 5y ago
      An organization like, say, Consumer Reports? I assume that if they're selected by and accountable to me, I could choose to use a competitor organization, right? Otherwise they're neither chosen by me nor accountable to me, after all...
      - blowski 5y ago
        I think the OP meant Congress and the elected government in general.
      - bastawhiz 5y ago
        Maybe one that could break up monopolies or actually enforce consequences for endangering people with faulty or unsafe products. And one whose output shouldn't cost money to consume.
- tenebrisalietum 5y ago
  Do you even know with a brand? Companies buy and sell brands all the time. A crappy Android-based Phillips TV I bought about 2 years ago was a rebranded Funai.
  - kbenson 5y ago
    You may not know exactly at any one moment because that's the nature of reality, things change, but you'll know with non-negligible likelihood that well known and respected brands will continue to be, or they will lose some of that respect and reputation. For example, I very recently heard that you should be careful about Philips TVs, and that they may be rebranded off-brand models. ;)
- lapetitejort 5y ago
  "Brands" in the literal sense would still exist. As a savvy consumer I would have to know all of the physical counterfeiting measures (the brand) of Louis Vuitton to know I was buying a genuine bag. That doesn't stop someone from replicating said counterfeiting measures. The group with the highest quality bag and/or strongest counterfeit measures wins the money.
  - kube-system 5y ago
    Limiting the discussion to luxury consumer discretionaries really diminishes the gravity and scope of this issue. But how about B2B or B2G goods? How do you know there's not any counterfeit parts in the elevator at the mall? In your medicines? In the bridge you're driving on?
- kristopolous 5y ago
  IP generally doesn't mean trademark. There's other reasons for that existing. For instance, liability. Let's say the name Quaker Oates was allowed (with the e) and they used horrible inspection and poisoned dozens of people. Quaker Oats, the company everyone thinks of, could show damage to their brand. This isn't IP
tablespoon 5y ago
> IP has always rubbed me as preoccupied with protecting a past instead of forging a future. Honestly, I think that must because you're using "IP" in a kind of vague way. I think it's important to distinguish: 1) more traditional IP regimes, that were designed to incentivize the creation of new things by protecting the people who made the initial effort to bring them into being, and... 2) ...more modern IP regimes, that have been twisted and perverted by powerful entities to protect their ability to milk old work for more profit. You can support #1 without supporting #2, and abolishing #1 to get rid of #2 would (in many, many cases) just lead to the return of old abuses (e.g. why should a publisher pay an author anything when they could just copy their book without paying).
- infogulch 5y ago
  Where is the line between 1 & 2? And how can it be re-drawn in a way that prevents it from simply being eroded again?
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > Where is the line between 1 & 2? And how can it be re-drawn in a way that prevents it from simply being eroded again? It's not a bright line, but more of a gradient with some difficult corner cases and tradeoffs. However, the extremes are pretty clear. > And how can it be re-drawn in a way that prevents it from simply being eroded again? It can't. The best anyone can do is be vigilant.
  - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    I believe with shortening them to eg. 1 year or two. You still have enough time to break into the market, to establish your position, on the other hand it stops the patenting of "useless" crap (eg, page-down moving one full page (and not screen) down), because patents cost money, and if your invention isn't something revolutionary, it's not worth patenting it for such a short timeframe.
    - tablespoon 5y ago
      > I believe with shortening them to eg. 1 year or two. You still have enough time to break into the market, to establish your position I don't think that's enough time to do either of those things, even in the most wildly optimistic circumstances. Honestly a patent term probably should be at least 10 years for an actual invention, but they need to tighten up rules about what an invention actually is. The place where IP has really gone off the rails is copyright.
munificent 5y ago
> IP has always rubbed me as preoccupied with protecting a past instead of forging a future. You are right that IP law is fundamentally about time. A more nuanced way to think about it is that IP law provides a reliable framework to amortize the cost of information creation. Intellectual property is an unusual kind of good in that it: 1. Has extremely high fixed cost. 2. Has near-zero marginal cost. 3. Once the fixed cost is paid, anyone could become a seller for zero fixed cost and near-zero marginal cost. For example, I've spent the past six years of my life writing a book. That's a pretty high fixed cost. Once I've finished polishing it off, it costs me virtually the same to sell 1,000,000 eBook copies as it does for me to sell one. But, also, it would also cost you nearly nothing to take a copy of that eBook, start selling it, and keep all of the profit. You could even undercut me since you didn't pay the fixed cost anyway so have no expenses to recoup. Copyright law gives me a window of time where I can use the low marginal cost and protection from #3 to recoup the time investment I made in #1. Without that protection, the day my eBook goes on sale, someone can buy a copy and immediately start reselling their own copies of it as some dirt cheap price. In a world where that happens all the time, many people would be simply unwilling or unable to invest that high fixed cost and those goods wouldn't exist at all. There are interesting arguments to be had over how long/large this window of protection and exclusivity should be. But I think no window at all would be disastrous. > An effective monopoly over customers should be won through superior products in the marketplace That presumes a world where the marketplace has no influence over which products exist at all. Sure a marketplace that sells my book for $20 and $1 gives customers the choice and they can take the $1. That's clearly superior: same great book, much lower price. But a marketplace where I spend years writing only to have someone else profit from my book is a marketplace where the book doesn't exist as a product at all because I wouldn't write it. (You might argue that people should be creating information products out of the goodness of their hearts and not for financial gain. That's a nice sentiment, but the consequence of it is that it means that only the rich participate in creative culture since only they have the luxury to create in their free time.)
- kristopolous 5y ago
  The much more common reality is the publisher doesn't release the rights back to the author when it goes out of print or after liquidations, mergers, and acquisitions the current owner of a work is often confusing, especially if they were auctioned in blocks say during a chapter 7 bankruptcy of a publisher. Many media conglomerates had short-lived book publishing arms 50 years ago. The current owners of the successor companies may not even be aware they have those rights in any meaningful sense. These subsequent transfers don't get registered. So the paper trail is hard. Additionally researchers are hampered when trying to track down old newspapers or out of print material. For instance, many daily newspapers shuttered their doors in the past 30 years. Currently you mostly have to go to the Library of Congress, find a local library or historical society with archival microfilm, drive over there and then scrub through the rolls on an analog machine like it's the 1970s. Murky copyright prevents these defunct publications from being digitized. I really wish the existence of Mickey Mouse wasn't the reason I have to wait until COVID is over because the archives room is closed at a specific library I'd like to go to and they don't have the rights to digitize what they have on file. I'd gladly pay for it but nobody knows who to pay. I've tried tracking down the current right holders and the only person I heard back from claims (I believe incorrectly) they do not have those rights. I'm guessing the lawyers saw the long chain of transfers I documented and were just trying to play it safe. So here I am. Splendid. I'm pretty sure in your example there's many other laws that protect you from that kind of brazen theft
mensetmanusman 5y ago
“ An effective monopoly over customers should be won through superior products in the marketplace, not by inferior products defended in the courts.” Unfortunately, this is impossible in the context where some companies will just spew toxic waste in other countries with no regulation to save costs, so that behavior wins with no IP.

lallysingh 5y ago

Without a brand, how does the customer know who's products they're buying?

blowski 5y ago
Tangentially, it's fascinating how the opposite problem pops up on Amazon - how do I know I'm actually buying brand X on Amazon? Maybe the solutions to both problems are related.
- bastawhiz 5y ago
  It's almost as though there needs to be an organization that's appointed by and accountable to citizens to hold companies accountable for maintaining integrity on these matters.
  - randallsquared 5y ago
    An organization like, say, Consumer Reports? I assume that if they're selected by and accountable to me, I could choose to use a competitor organization, right? Otherwise they're neither chosen by me nor accountable to me, after all...
    - blowski 5y ago
      I think the OP meant Congress and the elected government in general.
    - bastawhiz 5y ago
      Maybe one that could break up monopolies or actually enforce consequences for endangering people with faulty or unsafe products. And one whose output shouldn't cost money to consume.
tenebrisalietum 5y ago
Do you even know with a brand? Companies buy and sell brands all the time. A crappy Android-based Phillips TV I bought about 2 years ago was a rebranded Funai.
- kbenson 5y ago
  You may not know exactly at any one moment because that's the nature of reality, things change, but you'll know with non-negligible likelihood that well known and respected brands will continue to be, or they will lose some of that respect and reputation. For example, I very recently heard that you should be careful about Philips TVs, and that they may be rebranded off-brand models. ;)
lapetitejort 5y ago
"Brands" in the literal sense would still exist. As a savvy consumer I would have to know all of the physical counterfeiting measures (the brand) of Louis Vuitton to know I was buying a genuine bag. That doesn't stop someone from replicating said counterfeiting measures. The group with the highest quality bag and/or strongest counterfeit measures wins the money.
- kube-system 5y ago
  Limiting the discussion to luxury consumer discretionaries really diminishes the gravity and scope of this issue. But how about B2B or B2G goods? How do you know there's not any counterfeit parts in the elevator at the mall? In your medicines? In the bridge you're driving on?
kristopolous 5y ago
IP generally doesn't mean trademark. There's other reasons for that existing. For instance, liability. Let's say the name Quaker Oates was allowed (with the e) and they used horrible inspection and poisoned dozens of people. Quaker Oats, the company everyone thinks of, could show damage to their brand. This isn't IP

tablespoon 5y ago

> IP has always rubbed me as preoccupied with protecting a past instead of forging a future. Honestly, I think that must because you're using "IP" in a kind of vague way. I think it's important to distinguish: 1) more traditional IP regimes, that were designed to incentivize the creation of new things by protecting the people who made the initial effort to bring them into being, and... 2) ...more modern IP regimes, that have been twisted and perverted by powerful entities to protect their ability to milk old work for more profit. You can support #1 without supporting #2, and abolishing #1 to get rid of #2 would (in many, many cases) just lead to the return of old abuses (e.g. why should a publisher pay an author anything when they could just copy their book without paying).

infogulch 5y ago
Where is the line between 1 & 2? And how can it be re-drawn in a way that prevents it from simply being eroded again?
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > Where is the line between 1 & 2? And how can it be re-drawn in a way that prevents it from simply being eroded again? It's not a bright line, but more of a gradient with some difficult corner cases and tradeoffs. However, the extremes are pretty clear. > And how can it be re-drawn in a way that prevents it from simply being eroded again? It can't. The best anyone can do is be vigilant.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  I believe with shortening them to eg. 1 year or two. You still have enough time to break into the market, to establish your position, on the other hand it stops the patenting of "useless" crap (eg, page-down moving one full page (and not screen) down), because patents cost money, and if your invention isn't something revolutionary, it's not worth patenting it for such a short timeframe.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > I believe with shortening them to eg. 1 year or two. You still have enough time to break into the market, to establish your position I don't think that's enough time to do either of those things, even in the most wildly optimistic circumstances. Honestly a patent term probably should be at least 10 years for an actual invention, but they need to tighten up rules about what an invention actually is. The place where IP has really gone off the rails is copyright.

munificent 5y ago

> IP has always rubbed me as preoccupied with protecting a past instead of forging a future. You are right that IP law is fundamentally about time. A more nuanced way to think about it is that IP law provides a reliable framework to amortize the cost of information creation. Intellectual property is an unusual kind of good in that it: 1. Has extremely high fixed cost. 2. Has near-zero marginal cost. 3. Once the fixed cost is paid, anyone could become a seller for zero fixed cost and near-zero marginal cost. For example, I've spent the past six years of my life writing a book. That's a pretty high fixed cost. Once I've finished polishing it off, it costs me virtually the same to sell 1,000,000 eBook copies as it does for me to sell one. But, also, it would also cost you nearly nothing to take a copy of that eBook, start selling it, and keep all of the profit. You could even undercut me since you didn't pay the fixed cost anyway so have no expenses to recoup. Copyright law gives me a window of time where I can use the low marginal cost and protection from #3 to recoup the time investment I made in #1. Without that protection, the day my eBook goes on sale, someone can buy a copy and immediately start reselling their own copies of it as some dirt cheap price. In a world where that happens all the time, many people would be simply unwilling or unable to invest that high fixed cost and those goods wouldn't exist at all. There are interesting arguments to be had over how long/large this window of protection and exclusivity should be. But I think no window at all would be disastrous. > An effective monopoly over customers should be won through superior products in the marketplace That presumes a world where the marketplace has no influence over which products exist at all. Sure a marketplace that sells my book for $20 and $1 gives customers the choice and they can take the $1. That's clearly superior: same great book, much lower price. But a marketplace where I spend years writing only to have someone else profit from my book is a marketplace where the book doesn't exist as a product at all because I wouldn't write it. (You might argue that people should be creating information products out of the goodness of their hearts and not for financial gain. That's a nice sentiment, but the consequence of it is that it means that only the rich participate in creative culture since only they have the luxury to create in their free time.)

kristopolous 5y ago
The much more common reality is the publisher doesn't release the rights back to the author when it goes out of print or after liquidations, mergers, and acquisitions the current owner of a work is often confusing, especially if they were auctioned in blocks say during a chapter 7 bankruptcy of a publisher. Many media conglomerates had short-lived book publishing arms 50 years ago. The current owners of the successor companies may not even be aware they have those rights in any meaningful sense. These subsequent transfers don't get registered. So the paper trail is hard. Additionally researchers are hampered when trying to track down old newspapers or out of print material. For instance, many daily newspapers shuttered their doors in the past 30 years. Currently you mostly have to go to the Library of Congress, find a local library or historical society with archival microfilm, drive over there and then scrub through the rolls on an analog machine like it's the 1970s. Murky copyright prevents these defunct publications from being digitized. I really wish the existence of Mickey Mouse wasn't the reason I have to wait until COVID is over because the archives room is closed at a specific library I'd like to go to and they don't have the rights to digitize what they have on file. I'd gladly pay for it but nobody knows who to pay. I've tried tracking down the current right holders and the only person I heard back from claims (I believe incorrectly) they do not have those rights. I'm guessing the lawyers saw the long chain of transfers I documented and were just trying to play it safe. So here I am. Splendid. I'm pretty sure in your example there's many other laws that protect you from that kind of brazen theft

mensetmanusman 5y ago

“ An effective monopoly over customers should be won through superior products in the marketplace, not by inferior products defended in the courts.” Unfortunately, this is impossible in the context where some companies will just spew toxic waste in other countries with no regulation to save costs, so that behavior wins with no IP.