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If you wanted to you could draw some correlations between IP laws and innovation throughout history. You could observe that the start of the renaissance coincid

If you wanted to you could draw some correlations between IP laws and innovation throughout history. You could observe that the start of the renaissance coincided with what was (likely) the worlds first patent system. You might also notice that no jurisdiction that has lacked IP protections has ever achieved signifiant levels of technological innovation. It could be reasonable to draw some inferences from that, but it's not exactly conclusive due to all of the other influencing factors that history failed to control for. A more reasonable approach would be to look at how resources are allocated today. R&D investments are made in areas where IP protections can be maintained. For technological innovations, this is largely through patents, or by not actually disclosing your IP to the public (by offering your innovation as a service rather than a product to your customers). There are examples of business that have attempted to operate without IP protections, but they've frequently been massive failures that have reverted back to asserting IP protections in order to survive (Mongo, Elastic, Docker...). There's examples of innovation resourced by non-IP related means, but this is obviously not a very successful model, because the level of innovation it produces is tiny compared to the innovation resourced by IP protection. I can't think of any company that has managed to replicate the RHEL model recently. The give something away for free to drive sales of something else model is quite limited in the ways it can be applied, and often times it's back by selling something with IP rights attached to it. Do you think Intel would put so much effort into contributing to Linux if it didn't have other IP that it wanted to sell you to run your Linux on?

advael 5y ago
Yes, when you look at phenomena in retrospect, you can decide that all kinds of things are the sole unique cause of other things that happened afterwards In general, it's very easy, starting with a model and a bunch of phenomena, to explain why all the phenomena fit the model, regardless of what the model is. This is why we care about things like randomized controlled trials or recording when a hypothesis fails to predict a result in science It's also ridiculous to claim that monetary investment in a context that does have a strong concept of IP demonstrates that it creates more innovation: My whole argument is that the value of IP is to hoard it in order to make money, and companies invest in things that produce it because it will make them money. Given the financial incentives involved, it is vacuously true that this will happen under the current laws, and this has no bearing on whether this is more efficient or produces or encourages innovation In software, a considerable amount of innovation does happen in FOSS, and gets re-used in industry to build products. This just doesn't get captured as said technologies (libraries, drivers, etc) turning a profit themselves because again, the laws as they currently exist do strongly incentivize, with money, doing things the way the most profitable corporations in this space do it, tautologically Intel contributing to FOSS is a great example of why a company would care about FOSS even in the absence of IP: Intel sells, first and foremost, a physical good that it has invested considerably in infrastructure to produce, which involves a supply chain, equipment, and material expertise that is expensive and difficult to replicate, much less at the scale that lowers their costs. Without software, that physical product would be of little value to most people, but without patents on the chips, Intel would still be able to manufacture and sell chips and turn a profit

advael 5y ago

Yes, when you look at phenomena in retrospect, you can decide that all kinds of things are the sole unique cause of other things that happened afterwards In general, it's very easy, starting with a model and a bunch of phenomena, to explain why all the phenomena fit the model, regardless of what the model is. This is why we care about things like randomized controlled trials or recording when a hypothesis fails to predict a result in science It's also ridiculous to claim that monetary investment in a context that does have a strong concept of IP demonstrates that it creates more innovation: My whole argument is that the value of IP is to hoard it in order to make money, and companies invest in things that produce it because it will make them money. Given the financial incentives involved, it is vacuously true that this will happen under the current laws, and this has no bearing on whether this is more efficient or produces or encourages innovation In software, a considerable amount of innovation does happen in FOSS, and gets re-used in industry to build products. This just doesn't get captured as said technologies (libraries, drivers, etc) turning a profit themselves because again, the laws as they currently exist do strongly incentivize, with money, doing things the way the most profitable corporations in this space do it, tautologically Intel contributing to FOSS is a great example of why a company would care about FOSS even in the absence of IP: Intel sells, first and foremost, a physical good that it has invested considerably in infrastructure to produce, which involves a supply chain, equipment, and material expertise that is expensive and difficult to replicate, much less at the scale that lowers their costs. Without software, that physical product would be of little value to most people, but without patents on the chips, Intel would still be able to manufacture and sell chips and turn a profit