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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 complain

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

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