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>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 a

>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?
- sbierwagen 5y ago
  >when someone sells a T-shirt with their art on it without asking, attributing, or paying for it The rest of your comment is talking about patents. Was this person's art patented?
  - advael 5y ago
    Irrelevant. The comment I was responding to said the following: "...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." I am responding directly to that claim, and have used as examples situations involving patents and situations involving copyright, with the intention of conveying that there is not a single facet of this whole area of law that seems to function well in practice unless your interests are aligned with monopolistic corporate power. Most examples of it not being that bad are examples of it simply not coming up
- bdowling 5y ago
  The fact that there are disputes over who has an IP right does not mean that IP law is an outright failure and should be abolished. By that logic, disputes over who committed a crime would mean that criminal law is an outright failure and should be abolished. The fact that there are disputes over who has an IP right means that IP rights are important and valuable and are therefore worth fighting about.
  - Aerroon 5y ago
    But these constant court disputes mean that it moves some technologies outside of the realm of regular people. If Apple gets a patent for "Display with Pixel Dimming for Curved Edges" then regular people and smaller companies can't use that even if Apple's patent is nonsense. You can only afford to fight off so many lawsuits and still continue doing your original work.
    - bdowling 5y ago
      Most individuals and small companies should(*) just ignore patents they think are invalid because in almost all cases either (a) the patent is actually invalid and the patent owner won't actually litigate it or (b) the patent is valid but much narrower in scope than they think it is. Every patent I've seen held up here on HN as an example of an overly-broad, clearly invalid patent has had much narrower claims than the presenter admits. (*) I am a lawyer, but not your lawyer. This is a general observation and not legal advice. Your actual case will be different.
abecedarius 5y ago
> works fairly well. Here's a case I randomly ran across 20 years ago. Sun had recently patented a sequence of three assembly instructions. At the time I read about it, I'd also been reading a 1987 paper that presented that same "invention", and not as a core result, but as an example in an appendix. It had been found by the author's superoptimizer, a kind of brute-force "AI" (to bring it back closer to this thread). Just to tighten the screws, the lawyer writing the patent put in this passage: > While embodiments and applications of this invention have been shown and described, it would be apparent to those skilled in the art that many more modifications than mentioned above are possible without departing from the inventive concepts herein. The invention, therefore, is not to be restricted except in the spirit of the appended claims. So they didn't just appropriate those three lines of old assembly, they made a grab at everything in its neighborhood. And it was granted. The only part of this that especially surprised me was the coincidence of having that paper fresh in memory just when this patent came up in some discussion online. (Source: https://darius.livejournal.com/8835.html https://darius.livejournal.com/8835.html)
kragen 5y ago
The day-to-day mundane aspects of "IP" law* do "work fairly well," yes, but their purpose is not to benefit the public, and as it happens, they do not benefit the public. There are spectacular cases where they cause great and spectacular damage to the public like those you mention, while in the common day-to-day cases they cause less damage, or in any case subtler damage. Occasionally they provide a public benefit, but in those cases they are malfunctioning, and often such cases get fixed. Fundamentally, the operation of "intellectual property" is to treat your intellect as someone else's property under the law. By granting economic monopolies to private companies in particular goods, such as the sale of copies of _1984_, the government converts the abundance provided by our modern machinery into artificial scarcity, thus providing those companies with monopoly profits. The rationale given for this is that it provides an incentive to create those goods in the first place, but where economists have analyzed these incentives quantitatively, it invariably results that the monopoly rights currently granted cause enormously more harm to the public than the extra production they propel. ______ * "Intellectual property" is a fairly incoherent group of laws that it rarely makes sense to discuss collectively. Here I mean copyrights, patents, trade secrets, sui generis database protection, and noncompete agreements, rather than trademarks, mask works, and privacy.
cycomanic 5y ago
We should have such a review no matter what. We always call for these reviews when people want to change things, but should we not also review old practices which where never reviewed before?

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?

sbierwagen 5y ago
>when someone sells a T-shirt with their art on it without asking, attributing, or paying for it The rest of your comment is talking about patents. Was this person's art patented?
- advael 5y ago
  Irrelevant. The comment I was responding to said the following: "...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." I am responding directly to that claim, and have used as examples situations involving patents and situations involving copyright, with the intention of conveying that there is not a single facet of this whole area of law that seems to function well in practice unless your interests are aligned with monopolistic corporate power. Most examples of it not being that bad are examples of it simply not coming up
bdowling 5y ago
The fact that there are disputes over who has an IP right does not mean that IP law is an outright failure and should be abolished. By that logic, disputes over who committed a crime would mean that criminal law is an outright failure and should be abolished. The fact that there are disputes over who has an IP right means that IP rights are important and valuable and are therefore worth fighting about.
- Aerroon 5y ago
  But these constant court disputes mean that it moves some technologies outside of the realm of regular people. If Apple gets a patent for "Display with Pixel Dimming for Curved Edges" then regular people and smaller companies can't use that even if Apple's patent is nonsense. You can only afford to fight off so many lawsuits and still continue doing your original work.
  - bdowling 5y ago
    Most individuals and small companies should(*) just ignore patents they think are invalid because in almost all cases either (a) the patent is actually invalid and the patent owner won't actually litigate it or (b) the patent is valid but much narrower in scope than they think it is. Every patent I've seen held up here on HN as an example of an overly-broad, clearly invalid patent has had much narrower claims than the presenter admits. (*) I am a lawyer, but not your lawyer. This is a general observation and not legal advice. Your actual case will be different.

abecedarius 5y ago

> works fairly well. Here's a case I randomly ran across 20 years ago. Sun had recently patented a sequence of three assembly instructions. At the time I read about it, I'd also been reading a 1987 paper that presented that same "invention", and not as a core result, but as an example in an appendix. It had been found by the author's superoptimizer, a kind of brute-force "AI" (to bring it back closer to this thread). Just to tighten the screws, the lawyer writing the patent put in this passage: > While embodiments and applications of this invention have been shown and described, it would be apparent to those skilled in the art that many more modifications than mentioned above are possible without departing from the inventive concepts herein. The invention, therefore, is not to be restricted except in the spirit of the appended claims. So they didn't just appropriate those three lines of old assembly, they made a grab at everything in its neighborhood. And it was granted. The only part of this that especially surprised me was the coincidence of having that paper fresh in memory just when this patent came up in some discussion online. (Source: https://darius.livejournal.com/8835.html https://darius.livejournal.com/8835.html)

kragen 5y ago

The day-to-day mundane aspects of "IP" law* do "work fairly well," yes, but their purpose is not to benefit the public, and as it happens, they do not benefit the public. There are spectacular cases where they cause great and spectacular damage to the public like those you mention, while in the common day-to-day cases they cause less damage, or in any case subtler damage. Occasionally they provide a public benefit, but in those cases they are malfunctioning, and often such cases get fixed. Fundamentally, the operation of "intellectual property" is to treat your intellect as someone else's property under the law. By granting economic monopolies to private companies in particular goods, such as the sale of copies of _1984_, the government converts the abundance provided by our modern machinery into artificial scarcity, thus providing those companies with monopoly profits. The rationale given for this is that it provides an incentive to create those goods in the first place, but where economists have analyzed these incentives quantitatively, it invariably results that the monopoly rights currently granted cause enormously more harm to the public than the extra production they propel. ______ * "Intellectual property" is a fairly incoherent group of laws that it rarely makes sense to discuss collectively. Here I mean copyrights, patents, trade secrets, sui generis database protection, and noncompete agreements, rather than trademarks, mask works, and privacy.

cycomanic 5y ago

We should have such a review no matter what. We always call for these reviews when people want to change things, but should we not also review old practices which where never reviewed before?