12 ms·

This seems like the antebellum for an IP reckoning similar to what resulted in the DMCA in the United States in the late 90s. The technology is getting to the p

by advael 5y ago

This seems like the antebellum for an IP reckoning similar to what resulted in the DMCA in the United States in the late 90s. The technology is getting to the point where it makes the law as it stands pretty nonsensical in the face of what can be done The scope of patents in software and technology is already absurd, both because 12 years is an eternity for how quickly that industry moves, and because increasingly trivial "inventions" have been let through as the ability for patent officials to interpret complicated digital innovations according to patent law and policy has increasingly fallen behind the field. This is already a serious problem, but currently still takes expensive lawyers to take advantage of. Even if we make legal precedent that says that AI can't own patents, the advent of better purpose-specific text generation will quickly put patent trolling in the hands of laypeople Personally, I think the DMCA was a horrible mistake. The provisions it added to copyright created a ton of horrible precedent that led to the draconian control private companies exert over the lives of billions of people worldwide, justified in law by their intellectual property concerns. I believe that if Intellectual Property ever served a legitimate purpose, it has now run its course and needs to be dismantled. I hope that this new challenge moves us more in this direction, rather than some new awful legislative band-aid that attempts to preserve the status quo by destroying more of our rights

TehCorwiz 5y ago
I can understand why this is an unpopular take with this community regarding IP rights. Despite this being a valid opinion I'm noticing a lot of people complaining with their downvote button instead of an argument.
- advael 5y ago
  I agree, and my strong stance against IP as a legal principle in general is extremely unpopular in just about any circle I talk to. I nonetheless think it's both correct and important. I think people have bought pretty heavily into the rhetoric surrounding the value of IP: That it exists to protect the rights of creators. As far as I can tell, there are three major problems with this 1. IP assignment is overwhelmingly not retained by the creator of any work covered by IP. The vast overwhelming majority of engineers, for example, have in their contract of employment assigned all rights to any IP they generate in their work to the company they work for. The same is true of artists who contract with distributors 2. Independent creators often have no ability to successfully defend their IP claims, because said claims require expensive litigation, the cases are never straightforward enough for a summary judgement, and the individual nature of the claims mean that a class action lawsuit is nearly always infeasible 3. The way that IP law has been interpreted, especially under the DMCA, is incredibly abusable. The early history of the DMCA saw massive lawsuits filed by corporations against individuals based on obviously ridiculous numbers calculated as "potential lost sales" using flimsy evidence. A whole new business model of tech patent trolling has created a cottage industry that makes as many spurious claims as it can in order to leech money from businesses without producing anything of value. The current reading of the DMCA stymies users' attempts to repair their devices or even protect their privacy, because they can be criminally liable for attempts to modify devices that can be argued to be partially acting as DRM mechanisms, sometimes on the code running on the device itself. When we talk about the value of a law or policy, the intent of the law is at best a diagnostic tool for an untested new kind of attempt at something. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what a policy or law intends, it matters what the effects of the law are when interpreted and enforced. Intellectual Property as a legal paradigm generally is malfunctioning in a lot of places that harm people, harm society, and fail to uphold its promise. I think that the concept of ownership over ideas as a whole is at this phase in humman history doing much, much more harm than good, and needs to be eroded and eventually abolished from law As for how creative people can make money off of their work in an environment without IP, there's actually a pretty clear answer for this that is not even my observation. Most creative work right now is paid for at production, not based on IP rights. The engineers working at a company are paid for their time and labor, and sign over the IP they produce. Independent artists work on commissions, and at a larger scale, crowdfund their projects. It is only the occasionally very established and wealthy artist or inventor that can really take advantage of IP laws, and their beneficiaries are as it stands mostly large corporations, treating IP as effectively a dragon hoard of speculative assets they can monetize through litigation and threats thereof. Most of the effect of this is stifling, not encouraging, independent innovation Also, international agreements like the WTO have put the entire globe in a worse situation with regards to COVID vaccines - which need rapid, global distribution to be effective - because of patent rights over those vaccines. While many vaccines have resulted from a large amount of public funding, the IP controlling their production is largely in the hands of private corporations which view non-affiliated production of vaccines as cutting into their bottom line. They not only refuse to share the know-how to ramp up production with organizations trying to build up this capability worldwide, but have threatened to actively shut down such efforts if they happen anyway. This is obviously terrible for humanity as a whole, as we are currently in a situation where existing production and distribution is inadequate to keep ahead of variant evolution
  - omginternets 5y ago
    You’ve convincingly shown that current IP law fails to fulfill its intended purpose. But this is very different from the principle of intellectual property being undesirable. What justifies your stronger claim that IP itself should be done away with?
    - advael 5y ago
      This kind of gets into philosophy, but I think that ownership of ideas is just an indefensible principle in the first place, which is why people generally only justify IP with rose-tinted ideas about its intended practical effects. Here are some major reasons I think it doesn't make sense: 1. We understand that ideas build on each other. It has always worked this way, and it is overwhelmingly the way humans get things done. Every scientific discovery stands on the shoulders of giants. Every story or song is influenced by ones that came before it. Creativity is valuable, but to define the entirety of a creative endeavor as undeniably the effort of a single person is insane. Because creativity builds on other creativity, any legal concept that tries to parcel out unique contributions of individuals or groups and impose a tariff on them is likely to stifle innovation, because any time it actually comes to matter, it can only create an unnatural block on a creative effort 2. Most people who have worked in a creative field understand that a concept or idea is seldom of much value, and must be executed in some way to be meaningful. Various concepts of intellectual property even try to capture this, e.g. by granting rights over performances or recordings specifically. The best arguments I've heard for "intellectual property" abstractly are as an interim solution for allowing collaborations to produce economic value for the person who didn't control the distribution, but this essentially can't function if we treat these rights as "property", because property entails the right to transfer this property, creating a mechanism to effectively void these rights. 3. Attribution is a valuable ethical principle, and giving people due credit for their ideas is an important part of creative endeavors from science to music, but property rights are simply not the correct framework to legislate this with. False claims of attribution can be fraud or sometimes defamation, and attribution can be proven by the well-understood mechanism of demonstrable prior art. Proof of prior art is more technologically feasible to ensure in an era where we have cryptographic signatures to uniquely prove authenticity and the ability to easily publish something with a timestamp to an archive
- rasen58 5y ago
  There's a down vote button on HN? I only ever see only the upvote one
  - david_allison 5y ago
    You need 501 karma https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#downvoting-comments https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#downvo...
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- thereisnospork 5y ago
  I can only speak for myself but I find it to be a banal position[0], not worthy of serious argument or discussion. It is also both broad and over reaching to a degree that implies that a reasonable discussion will not be had and is an aggressive tangent from the article topic: 'moron[1] tries to argue that his 'AI' is sentient and therefore capable of being an inventor'. [0]Roughly the equivalent of 'I believe that if <Fiat Currency> ever served a legitimate purpose, it has now run its course and needs to be dismantled. <Because of Bitcoin/crypto>' [1]Derision intended
TaylorAlexander 5y ago
In general I feel like patents have jumped the shark. Maybe they made sense when they applied to local jurisdictions as a means of growing local manufacturing capacity. But global patents just prevent huge numbers of people from innovating. People worldwide would love to make pharmaceuticals more affordable for example, but huge restrictions are placed on how they can operate. They can’t innovate to manufacture an existing drug cheaply using local materials because some multinational owns the patent. 3D printers are another example. In 1995 they were introduced under patent for $50,000 and ten years later the price was $25,000. In 2018 the patents expired and hobbyists got to work designing cheaper machines. Within three years a $2000 machine was decent and ten years after the patent expired $300 machines were available worldwide. Can you imagine how prosperous the whole world would be if they were permitted to copy the best available medical equipment, find effective ways to lower manufacturing costs as with the 3D printers, and then we had cheap high quality medical machinery available worldwide? This would be a revolution in global wealth growth with little cost to the existing wealthy countries. We would benefit from a more rapidly industrialized world with less direct investment required to make it happen, and we would benefit from more diversity of ideas. I really have to call out Bill Gates who said in 2021 “we can’t just open source the vaccine because factories to make it don’t exist the world over” but he would have been perfectly capable of making those investments in 2020 if what he really wanted was maximum vaccine production. He’s thinking in top down systems and I really think we need to understand how effective bottom up engineering can be, as with 3D printers.
- fsckboy 5y ago
  > People worldwide would love to make pharmaceuticals more affordable for example well, the purpose of the patent is to both reward/incentivize and allow the original inventor a monopoly for a period of time to earn back time risk and the development costs, and that monopoly is going to come with higher prices. it's the point of a patent, you can't very well say that patents undermine the ability to undermine them: it's nonsensical! I'm not defending patents nor saying we need them, I'm simply saying you can't say "patents don't work because they do what they were designed to"
  - 5y ago
AussieWog93 5y ago
>I believe that if Intellectual Property ever served a legitimate purpose, it has now run its course and needs to be dismantled. I understand that this is HN and not Congress, but I would also hope that any Government body that is seriously considering this would do a thorough review before passing laws to this effect. We read articles all the time about patent trolls abusing Texan courthouses to hold real engineers to ransom, and innovation being blocked by patent holders successfully arguing that an obvious innovation was non-obvious (e.g. RED's patent on compressed RAW data), but I don't think many people here would be familiar with the day-to-day, mundane aspects of IP law which probably, for the most part, works fairly well.
- crocodiletears 5y ago
  Sweeping patent trolls aside, the rapid industrial and technological progression of China seems like a good argument for (at least temporarily) suspending IP regimes in order to facilitate periods of accelerated advancement that permit new combinations of otherwise legally locked-down technologies and cultural artifacts.
  - beecafe 5y ago
    Dog eat dog vs dog entrench power (and not be eaten)
- advael 5y ago
  I don't buy it. I know people who have worked for patent firms, and independent artists who have tried in vain to enforce the rights they're supposed to have when someone sells a T-shirt with their art on it without asking, attributing, or paying for it. Industries from software to biotech to agricultural equipment have been abusing patents for decades, and the lawyers involved all know that the name of the game is to go as broad and nebulous as possible to as to lock down huge swaths of potential applications of some general principle. Pharmaceutical and biotech companies are even perversely incentivized to rush new, exotic, poorly-understood chemicals and genetic variants of plants to market and capture prescribers because they can enforce monopolies about it, or patent the treatment of new conditions with public-domain drugs. Where exactly is IP law functioning well?
matheusmoreira 5y ago
> I believe that if Intellectual Property ever served a legitimate purpose, it has now run its course and needs to be dismantled. Completely agree. Intellectual property in general needs to be abolished. Copyright in particular is irredeemable at this point.
daniel_iversen 5y ago
I know it’s a little unrelated to the article at hand, but you mention a lot about DMCA being a mistake, so as someone who doesn’t know a lot about it and it being an interesting topic, could you tell us more about why that is?
- advael 5y ago
  I posted some explanation as a reply to AmericanChopper below that I think is a good summary of my take on this
secondaryacct 5y ago
"DCMA" "worldwide"... dude I know the US feels big, but it's a tiny part of the global jurisdiction. In my country google isn't even available. Where I grew up, software patents were banned and right to copy very protected. Stop thinking it's a global problem: just like the regular murder of children at school by other children, it's a very american problem. You can absolutely fix it yourself.
- LMYahooTFY 5y ago
  This comment just reads as "I find Americans or American-related politics annoying". It's particularly ironic on HN; Internet companies are world wide, and the DMCA is used by them frequently. The OP was entirely accurate with his wording, and you're very off base here.
- slim 5y ago
  Where did you grew up?
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Unfortunately, most US problems actually are problems for the entire Western world. The US tends to export its problems - sometimes on the backs of nuclear aircraft carriers (e.g. DMCA and other IP-related regulations, financial regulations), sometimes through culture (e.g. US issues bleeding through to European activists, even though those issues don't exist here, or are nowhere near as problematic).
stefan_ 5y ago
If only anyone would actually do DMCA? YouTube, Twitch et al pretend to have a "DMCA strike system" but in fact they are trying to co-opt the term for "we have entirely bowed to the demands of producers" and instituted systems that have nothing to do with DMCA. Under DMCA, if someone strikes my classical music composition, I write a one sentence counter notice and that is it. There is no "three strikes" or "YouTube sides with the content producer instead of your counter notice" in DMCA at all. There are basically only two fixes needed for DMCA: 1) legal liability for false or fraudulent DMCA notices, ideally with punitive damages; 2) platforms that do pretend-DMCA for removing user generated content incur the liability for their actions.
- advael 5y ago
  The provisions you describe are a minor inconvenience compared to the sweeping provision that criminalizes circumvention of anything that could be construed as DRM
- stale2002 5y ago
  > instituted systems that have nothing to do with DMCA. > Under DMCA, if someone strikes my classical music composition, I write a one sentence counter notice and that is it. Although I agree that there could be problems if a system has no counter-claim process (although, I think that this claim of your is factually incorrect. I think youtube has counterclaims, even for its "fake" DMCAs), I think that you have strongly mis-interpreted the motivations for having "fake" DMCA processes. The motivations for having fake DMCAs, is that if someone doesn't get a real DMCA, then there is no longer any legal obligation to perma-ban someone for being a "repeat" infringer. This draconian, repeat infringer policy, which many platforms have, is bad for everyone. And getting around it helps creators. > "YouTube sides with the content producer instead of your counter notice" in DMCA at all. I am not sure why you think this is the case. If there is a counter claim, youtube is required by law to respect the counterclaim.
  - wtallis 5y ago
    > I am not sure why you think this is the case. If there is a counter claim, youtube is required by law to respect the counterclaim. Not if it's the counter-claim in their non-DMCA process.
mannykannot 5y ago
This looks more like a publicity stunt that anything else. When the AI can generate a cogent argument for its invention being patentable, then I would be prepared to consider its claim. Until then, comparisons to the DMCA seem overblown.
- kevinmchugh 5y ago
  Isn't that what a patent lawyer is for?
  - mannykannot 5y ago
    A patent lawyer helps you make the case in the correct form, with all the necessary issues addressed. If the AI could work with a patent attorney not already familiar with the technical field of the invention, then I would accept it as the inventor, but if the attorney has to use her own knowledge, or that of third-party experts, to understand what the alleged invention is and whether it is novel, then no. It is all about whether the AI itself understands its supposed invention.
reilly3000 5y ago
Technology has always been the bellwether of legislation. Personal automobiles brought along traffic laws. Firearms were regulated early and often. AI, and it’s descendants will necessarily need legislation if they are of any consequence.
Avicebron 5y ago
says the dude who runs basic script and calls himself an ai genius, your not slick bro, your trash who thinks hes smart, we all ran limewire, and we know what your talking about, youre just a clown
- dang 5y ago
  Whoa, personal attacks like that will get you banned here. Users need to stick to the rules regardless of how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sandworm101 5y ago
We miss the underlying problem, the real motivations behind this push towards AI-inventors. AI inventors are owned entities. Anything "invented" by them would be wholly owned by whatever entity owns or controls the AI. Allowing this could open the door to everyday software tools becoming co-authors. Scenario: Microsoft owns copyright over AI and makes AI available as part of windows. Are all "inventions" made using windows now also partially created/owned by Microsoft? Nobody would say that Microsoft should get rights to a book because the author using Word's spellchecker, but what about an AI-based translator program? Is the AI a co-author? If so, Microsoft could argue that it is a part owner of everything created using an AI-enabled MSword. Scenario: Photographer takes picture of mountain. They get copyright because the contributed to the setting up of the camera. They pick the scene and they pushed the button. But new AI camera, with AI trained on all the best photographs, is now in control. Autofocus does not make the camera a creator, but an AI that has a hand in every detail of the photograph? An AI that is legally allowed to be a copyright owner? Is every photograph now a joint work between human and AI? There are lots of iPhone cameras out there. What is Apple's stance on AI creators?
- flimflamm 5y ago
  " Are all "inventions" made using windows now also partially created/owned by Microsoft? " I suppose that depends on what crafty Microsoft lawyers have written to the contracts. I would assume no. It's a tool which is in the possession of the person who bought the license from Microsoft.
- elcomet 5y ago
  Nobody would use Word if the terms of service said that Microsoft will be co-owner of everything you write
  - swarnie 5y ago
    You have too much faith in humanity I bet a billion people getting word bundled with O365 would still use it, mostly because no one would have read page 3456 of the ToS and wouldn't know any better. Some nerd packs online would scream it from the rooftops but 98% of the population wouldn't care.
netcan 5y ago
I totally agree about DMCA and internet-copyright, and the analogy to patents here. That said, IDK if AI-invented patents really pose a challenge. It might be a philosophical challenge to the idea of patents, but that doesn't necessarily translate into a challenge in practice. IMO logically, if machines cannot be inventors than anything invented by machine is arguably trivial. However, I don't think this kind of reasoning translates to a legible legal argument.
Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
> Personally, I think the DMCA was a horrible mistake. The provisions it added to copyright created a ton of horrible precedent that led to the draconian control private companies exert over the lives of billions of people worldwide, justified in law by their intellectual property concerns A mistake, or a resounding success in achieving exactly what you mention? Do you really think the DMCA was passed with the people's interests in mind?
- advael 5y ago
  Absolutely a fair point

by advael 5y ago

TehCorwiz 5y ago

I can understand why this is an unpopular take with this community regarding IP rights. Despite this being a valid opinion I'm noticing a lot of people complaining with their downvote button instead of an argument.

advael 5y ago
I agree, and my strong stance against IP as a legal principle in general is extremely unpopular in just about any circle I talk to. I nonetheless think it's both correct and important. I think people have bought pretty heavily into the rhetoric surrounding the value of IP: That it exists to protect the rights of creators. As far as I can tell, there are three major problems with this 1. IP assignment is overwhelmingly not retained by the creator of any work covered by IP. The vast overwhelming majority of engineers, for example, have in their contract of employment assigned all rights to any IP they generate in their work to the company they work for. The same is true of artists who contract with distributors 2. Independent creators often have no ability to successfully defend their IP claims, because said claims require expensive litigation, the cases are never straightforward enough for a summary judgement, and the individual nature of the claims mean that a class action lawsuit is nearly always infeasible 3. The way that IP law has been interpreted, especially under the DMCA, is incredibly abusable. The early history of the DMCA saw massive lawsuits filed by corporations against individuals based on obviously ridiculous numbers calculated as "potential lost sales" using flimsy evidence. A whole new business model of tech patent trolling has created a cottage industry that makes as many spurious claims as it can in order to leech money from businesses without producing anything of value. The current reading of the DMCA stymies users' attempts to repair their devices or even protect their privacy, because they can be criminally liable for attempts to modify devices that can be argued to be partially acting as DRM mechanisms, sometimes on the code running on the device itself. When we talk about the value of a law or policy, the intent of the law is at best a diagnostic tool for an untested new kind of attempt at something. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what a policy or law intends, it matters what the effects of the law are when interpreted and enforced. Intellectual Property as a legal paradigm generally is malfunctioning in a lot of places that harm people, harm society, and fail to uphold its promise. I think that the concept of ownership over ideas as a whole is at this phase in humman history doing much, much more harm than good, and needs to be eroded and eventually abolished from law As for how creative people can make money off of their work in an environment without IP, there's actually a pretty clear answer for this that is not even my observation. Most creative work right now is paid for at production, not based on IP rights. The engineers working at a company are paid for their time and labor, and sign over the IP they produce. Independent artists work on commissions, and at a larger scale, crowdfund their projects. It is only the occasionally very established and wealthy artist or inventor that can really take advantage of IP laws, and their beneficiaries are as it stands mostly large corporations, treating IP as effectively a dragon hoard of speculative assets they can monetize through litigation and threats thereof. Most of the effect of this is stifling, not encouraging, independent innovation Also, international agreements like the WTO have put the entire globe in a worse situation with regards to COVID vaccines - which need rapid, global distribution to be effective - because of patent rights over those vaccines. While many vaccines have resulted from a large amount of public funding, the IP controlling their production is largely in the hands of private corporations which view non-affiliated production of vaccines as cutting into their bottom line. They not only refuse to share the know-how to ramp up production with organizations trying to build up this capability worldwide, but have threatened to actively shut down such efforts if they happen anyway. This is obviously terrible for humanity as a whole, as we are currently in a situation where existing production and distribution is inadequate to keep ahead of variant evolution
- omginternets 5y ago
  You’ve convincingly shown that current IP law fails to fulfill its intended purpose. But this is very different from the principle of intellectual property being undesirable. What justifies your stronger claim that IP itself should be done away with?
  - advael 5y ago
    This kind of gets into philosophy, but I think that ownership of ideas is just an indefensible principle in the first place, which is why people generally only justify IP with rose-tinted ideas about its intended practical effects. Here are some major reasons I think it doesn't make sense: 1. We understand that ideas build on each other. It has always worked this way, and it is overwhelmingly the way humans get things done. Every scientific discovery stands on the shoulders of giants. Every story or song is influenced by ones that came before it. Creativity is valuable, but to define the entirety of a creative endeavor as undeniably the effort of a single person is insane. Because creativity builds on other creativity, any legal concept that tries to parcel out unique contributions of individuals or groups and impose a tariff on them is likely to stifle innovation, because any time it actually comes to matter, it can only create an unnatural block on a creative effort 2. Most people who have worked in a creative field understand that a concept or idea is seldom of much value, and must be executed in some way to be meaningful. Various concepts of intellectual property even try to capture this, e.g. by granting rights over performances or recordings specifically. The best arguments I've heard for "intellectual property" abstractly are as an interim solution for allowing collaborations to produce economic value for the person who didn't control the distribution, but this essentially can't function if we treat these rights as "property", because property entails the right to transfer this property, creating a mechanism to effectively void these rights. 3. Attribution is a valuable ethical principle, and giving people due credit for their ideas is an important part of creative endeavors from science to music, but property rights are simply not the correct framework to legislate this with. False claims of attribution can be fraud or sometimes defamation, and attribution can be proven by the well-understood mechanism of demonstrable prior art. Proof of prior art is more technologically feasible to ensure in an era where we have cryptographic signatures to uniquely prove authenticity and the ability to easily publish something with a timestamp to an archive
rasen58 5y ago
There's a down vote button on HN? I only ever see only the upvote one
- david_allison 5y ago
  You need 501 karma https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#downvoting-comments https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#downvo...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
thereisnospork 5y ago
I can only speak for myself but I find it to be a banal position[0], not worthy of serious argument or discussion. It is also both broad and over reaching to a degree that implies that a reasonable discussion will not be had and is an aggressive tangent from the article topic: 'moron[1] tries to argue that his 'AI' is sentient and therefore capable of being an inventor'. [0]Roughly the equivalent of 'I believe that if <Fiat Currency> ever served a legitimate purpose, it has now run its course and needs to be dismantled. <Because of Bitcoin/crypto>' [1]Derision intended

TaylorAlexander 5y ago

In general I feel like patents have jumped the shark. Maybe they made sense when they applied to local jurisdictions as a means of growing local manufacturing capacity. But global patents just prevent huge numbers of people from innovating. People worldwide would love to make pharmaceuticals more affordable for example, but huge restrictions are placed on how they can operate. They can’t innovate to manufacture an existing drug cheaply using local materials because some multinational owns the patent. 3D printers are another example. In 1995 they were introduced under patent for $50,000 and ten years later the price was $25,000. In 2018 the patents expired and hobbyists got to work designing cheaper machines. Within three years a $2000 machine was decent and ten years after the patent expired $300 machines were available worldwide. Can you imagine how prosperous the whole world would be if they were permitted to copy the best available medical equipment, find effective ways to lower manufacturing costs as with the 3D printers, and then we had cheap high quality medical machinery available worldwide? This would be a revolution in global wealth growth with little cost to the existing wealthy countries. We would benefit from a more rapidly industrialized world with less direct investment required to make it happen, and we would benefit from more diversity of ideas. I really have to call out Bill Gates who said in 2021 “we can’t just open source the vaccine because factories to make it don’t exist the world over” but he would have been perfectly capable of making those investments in 2020 if what he really wanted was maximum vaccine production. He’s thinking in top down systems and I really think we need to understand how effective bottom up engineering can be, as with 3D printers.

fsckboy 5y ago
> People worldwide would love to make pharmaceuticals more affordable for example well, the purpose of the patent is to both reward/incentivize and allow the original inventor a monopoly for a period of time to earn back time risk and the development costs, and that monopoly is going to come with higher prices. it's the point of a patent, you can't very well say that patents undermine the ability to undermine them: it's nonsensical! I'm not defending patents nor saying we need them, I'm simply saying you can't say "patents don't work because they do what they were designed to"
- 5y ago

AussieWog93 5y ago

>I believe that if Intellectual Property ever served a legitimate purpose, it has now run its course and needs to be dismantled. I understand that this is HN and not Congress, but I would also hope that any Government body that is seriously considering this would do a thorough review before passing laws to this effect. We read articles all the time about patent trolls abusing Texan courthouses to hold real engineers to ransom, and innovation being blocked by patent holders successfully arguing that an obvious innovation was non-obvious (e.g. RED's patent on compressed RAW data), but I don't think many people here would be familiar with the day-to-day, mundane aspects of IP law which probably, for the most part, works fairly well.

crocodiletears 5y ago
Sweeping patent trolls aside, the rapid industrial and technological progression of China seems like a good argument for (at least temporarily) suspending IP regimes in order to facilitate periods of accelerated advancement that permit new combinations of otherwise legally locked-down technologies and cultural artifacts.
- beecafe 5y ago
  Dog eat dog vs dog entrench power (and not be eaten)
advael 5y ago
I don't buy it. I know people who have worked for patent firms, and independent artists who have tried in vain to enforce the rights they're supposed to have when someone sells a T-shirt with their art on it without asking, attributing, or paying for it. Industries from software to biotech to agricultural equipment have been abusing patents for decades, and the lawyers involved all know that the name of the game is to go as broad and nebulous as possible to as to lock down huge swaths of potential applications of some general principle. Pharmaceutical and biotech companies are even perversely incentivized to rush new, exotic, poorly-understood chemicals and genetic variants of plants to market and capture prescribers because they can enforce monopolies about it, or patent the treatment of new conditions with public-domain drugs. Where exactly is IP law functioning well?

matheusmoreira 5y ago

> I believe that if Intellectual Property ever served a legitimate purpose, it has now run its course and needs to be dismantled. Completely agree. Intellectual property in general needs to be abolished. Copyright in particular is irredeemable at this point.

daniel_iversen 5y ago

I know it’s a little unrelated to the article at hand, but you mention a lot about DMCA being a mistake, so as someone who doesn’t know a lot about it and it being an interesting topic, could you tell us more about why that is?

advael 5y ago
I posted some explanation as a reply to AmericanChopper below that I think is a good summary of my take on this

secondaryacct 5y ago

"DCMA" "worldwide"... dude I know the US feels big, but it's a tiny part of the global jurisdiction. In my country google isn't even available. Where I grew up, software patents were banned and right to copy very protected. Stop thinking it's a global problem: just like the regular murder of children at school by other children, it's a very american problem. You can absolutely fix it yourself.

LMYahooTFY 5y ago
This comment just reads as "I find Americans or American-related politics annoying". It's particularly ironic on HN; Internet companies are world wide, and the DMCA is used by them frequently. The OP was entirely accurate with his wording, and you're very off base here.
slim 5y ago
Where did you grew up?
TeMPOraL 5y ago
Unfortunately, most US problems actually are problems for the entire Western world. The US tends to export its problems - sometimes on the backs of nuclear aircraft carriers (e.g. DMCA and other IP-related regulations, financial regulations), sometimes through culture (e.g. US issues bleeding through to European activists, even though those issues don't exist here, or are nowhere near as problematic).

stefan_ 5y ago

If only anyone would actually do DMCA? YouTube, Twitch et al pretend to have a "DMCA strike system" but in fact they are trying to co-opt the term for "we have entirely bowed to the demands of producers" and instituted systems that have nothing to do with DMCA. Under DMCA, if someone strikes my classical music composition, I write a one sentence counter notice and that is it. There is no "three strikes" or "YouTube sides with the content producer instead of your counter notice" in DMCA at all. There are basically only two fixes needed for DMCA: 1) legal liability for false or fraudulent DMCA notices, ideally with punitive damages; 2) platforms that do pretend-DMCA for removing user generated content incur the liability for their actions.

advael 5y ago
The provisions you describe are a minor inconvenience compared to the sweeping provision that criminalizes circumvention of anything that could be construed as DRM
stale2002 5y ago
> instituted systems that have nothing to do with DMCA. > Under DMCA, if someone strikes my classical music composition, I write a one sentence counter notice and that is it. Although I agree that there could be problems if a system has no counter-claim process (although, I think that this claim of your is factually incorrect. I think youtube has counterclaims, even for its "fake" DMCAs), I think that you have strongly mis-interpreted the motivations for having "fake" DMCA processes. The motivations for having fake DMCAs, is that if someone doesn't get a real DMCA, then there is no longer any legal obligation to perma-ban someone for being a "repeat" infringer. This draconian, repeat infringer policy, which many platforms have, is bad for everyone. And getting around it helps creators. > "YouTube sides with the content producer instead of your counter notice" in DMCA at all. I am not sure why you think this is the case. If there is a counter claim, youtube is required by law to respect the counterclaim.
- wtallis 5y ago
  > I am not sure why you think this is the case. If there is a counter claim, youtube is required by law to respect the counterclaim. Not if it's the counter-claim in their non-DMCA process.

mannykannot 5y ago

This looks more like a publicity stunt that anything else. When the AI can generate a cogent argument for its invention being patentable, then I would be prepared to consider its claim. Until then, comparisons to the DMCA seem overblown.

kevinmchugh 5y ago
Isn't that what a patent lawyer is for?
- mannykannot 5y ago
  A patent lawyer helps you make the case in the correct form, with all the necessary issues addressed. If the AI could work with a patent attorney not already familiar with the technical field of the invention, then I would accept it as the inventor, but if the attorney has to use her own knowledge, or that of third-party experts, to understand what the alleged invention is and whether it is novel, then no. It is all about whether the AI itself understands its supposed invention.

reilly3000 5y ago

Technology has always been the bellwether of legislation. Personal automobiles brought along traffic laws. Firearms were regulated early and often. AI, and it’s descendants will necessarily need legislation if they are of any consequence.

Avicebron 5y ago

says the dude who runs basic script and calls himself an ai genius, your not slick bro, your trash who thinks hes smart, we all ran limewire, and we know what your talking about, youre just a clown

dang 5y ago
Whoa, personal attacks like that will get you banned here. Users need to stick to the rules regardless of how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

sandworm101 5y ago

We miss the underlying problem, the real motivations behind this push towards AI-inventors. AI inventors are owned entities. Anything "invented" by them would be wholly owned by whatever entity owns or controls the AI. Allowing this could open the door to everyday software tools becoming co-authors. Scenario: Microsoft owns copyright over AI and makes AI available as part of windows. Are all "inventions" made using windows now also partially created/owned by Microsoft? Nobody would say that Microsoft should get rights to a book because the author using Word's spellchecker, but what about an AI-based translator program? Is the AI a co-author? If so, Microsoft could argue that it is a part owner of everything created using an AI-enabled MSword. Scenario: Photographer takes picture of mountain. They get copyright because the contributed to the setting up of the camera. They pick the scene and they pushed the button. But new AI camera, with AI trained on all the best photographs, is now in control. Autofocus does not make the camera a creator, but an AI that has a hand in every detail of the photograph? An AI that is legally allowed to be a copyright owner? Is every photograph now a joint work between human and AI? There are lots of iPhone cameras out there. What is Apple's stance on AI creators?

flimflamm 5y ago
" Are all "inventions" made using windows now also partially created/owned by Microsoft? " I suppose that depends on what crafty Microsoft lawyers have written to the contracts. I would assume no. It's a tool which is in the possession of the person who bought the license from Microsoft.
elcomet 5y ago
Nobody would use Word if the terms of service said that Microsoft will be co-owner of everything you write
- swarnie 5y ago
  You have too much faith in humanity I bet a billion people getting word bundled with O365 would still use it, mostly because no one would have read page 3456 of the ToS and wouldn't know any better. Some nerd packs online would scream it from the rooftops but 98% of the population wouldn't care.

netcan 5y ago

I totally agree about DMCA and internet-copyright, and the analogy to patents here. That said, IDK if AI-invented patents really pose a challenge. It might be a philosophical challenge to the idea of patents, but that doesn't necessarily translate into a challenge in practice. IMO logically, if machines cannot be inventors than anything invented by machine is arguably trivial. However, I don't think this kind of reasoning translates to a legible legal argument.

Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago

> Personally, I think the DMCA was a horrible mistake. The provisions it added to copyright created a ton of horrible precedent that led to the draconian control private companies exert over the lives of billions of people worldwide, justified in law by their intellectual property concerns A mistake, or a resounding success in achieving exactly what you mention? Do you really think the DMCA was passed with the people's interests in mind?

advael 5y ago
Absolutely a fair point