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Unpopular opinion: IP had to be invented so the concept of 'theft' could be applied to it. If your product can be reproduced by anyone then you have no real edg
by errantmind 5y ago
Unpopular opinion: IP had to be invented so the concept of 'theft' could be applied to it. If your product can be reproduced by anyone then you have no real edge.
The R&D argument is also bunk as there is little to nothing to support the idea that innovation would just stop if IP didn't exist to protect it
- jfengel 5y agoThat's actually a pretty popular opinion. That's why IP was created: so that people could have recourse when it was "stolen". The second part might be considered an unpopular opinion, except that everybody already knows that innovation existed before IP laws. The problem wasn't that people wouldn't innovate, but that they wouldn't share their innovation. That mattered a lot more when "innovation" was about big, heavy machines requiring large up-front investments. It wasn't intended to protect things that most people would consider obvious -- though of course from the very beginning there were tons of arguments about what was "obvious". If people are racing to get the patent on something, then neither one should really get it, since the whole point was to get people to share their ideas that others wouldn't have had on their own.
- errantmind 5y agoGood points. I'm not convinced there would be much of an issue with people sharing their ideas these days, especially with the internet. All it would take is one person to reverse engineer it.