3 ms·

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 bein

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
naasking 5y ago
You have it backwards: why should we permit people to claim ownership of ideas at all? We arguably have a natural right to mimic what we see others do, or apply the ideas that other teach us, or retell the stories that others told us. What a backwards world we live in where we have to justify exercising our natural rights.
- omginternets 5y ago
  >You have it backwards: why should we permit people to claim ownership of ideas at all? I don't think that's fair. I'm responding to a claim that IP is "wrong". The parent poster purported to demonstrate why this is so, and had not done this. The burden of proof is not on me.
  - naasking 5y ago
    Since you agreed with the OP that IP is no longer achieving it's stated goals, then the original reasons justifying the restrictions of our natural rights no longer hold and thus our natural rights take precedence. The burden for establishing continued restrictions is clear. You spoke of principles, but I think you got them backwards, and thus sought to clarify what the actual underlying principles are.

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

naasking 5y ago

You have it backwards: why should we permit people to claim ownership of ideas at all? We arguably have a natural right to mimic what we see others do, or apply the ideas that other teach us, or retell the stories that others told us. What a backwards world we live in where we have to justify exercising our natural rights.

omginternets 5y ago
>You have it backwards: why should we permit people to claim ownership of ideas at all? I don't think that's fair. I'm responding to a claim that IP is "wrong". The parent poster purported to demonstrate why this is so, and had not done this. The burden of proof is not on me.
- naasking 5y ago
  Since you agreed with the OP that IP is no longer achieving it's stated goals, then the original reasons justifying the restrictions of our natural rights no longer hold and thus our natural rights take precedence. The burden for establishing continued restrictions is clear. You spoke of principles, but I think you got them backwards, and thus sought to clarify what the actual underlying principles are.