8 ms·

There is a very real cost to society to provide patent and copyright. We have to have additional law enforcement, court, and prison capacity. It’s not clear a

by efitz 4y ago

There is a very real cost to society to provide patent and copyright. We have to have additional law enforcement, court, and prison capacity. It’s not clear at all to me that society is getting its money worth in defending essentially rent seeking behavior from big business. It’s also not clear that either patent or copyright in their current form actually “promote progress in the useful arts”. I hate the terms “intellectual property” and “piracy” because patent and copyright are not much like property at all, and because actual piracy is a crime of violence and nothing like infringement. And it’s not clear to me that the punishments inflicted are reasonable given the impact of the “crime”. Given that, I believe that we would be better off without patent or copyright, or with only a very modest time period of a couple years.

ChadNauseam 4y ago
How would you fund things like the discovery of new drugs, or the creation of big-budget movies, without parents and copyright respectively?
- zozbot234 4y ago
  New drugs are one thing (though even there, prizes and academic grants are a meaningful alternative to patent protection), but do we really need big-budget movies? They seem like a total waste. Most of them have trouble ever making a profit, and that's in spite of extreme levels of copyright enforcement (at least wrt. average users, not dedicated pirates).
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - dahart 4y ago
    > Most of them have trouble ever making a profit If that were true, most of the big-budget movie studios would be going out of business regularly. But that isn’t happening, by and large. They do sometimes want you to think they’re not making money. Having worked in the film & games industries, I’ve witnessed some of the creative accounting that gets used. > do we really need big-budget movies? They seem like a total waste. Well, people pay for them, and our IP laws are designed to protect the business of creations and inventions. Most of the pharma industry is also peddling stuff we don’t need and is wasteful, however it is big business.
    - rpdillon 4y ago
      They do make some money! > Here are the combined financial figures for all 29 Hollywood blockbusters (budgeted over $100m)… > Total combined budgets: $4.37 billion > Total combined costs (including budgets, marketing and all other costs): $11.52 billion > Total combined income (from all revenue streams): $11.95 billion > Profit across all movies: $428.9 million > An average profit of $14.8 million per movie The whole thing is an interesting read! https://stephenfollows.com/how-movies-make-money-hollywood-blockbusters/ https://stephenfollows.com/how-movies-make-money-hollywood-b...
      - dahart 4y ago
        It is interesting, but should be taken with a couple pretty big grains of salt IMO. It does a good job of discussing the many varied sources of cost and income. But the secret unsourced data of unnamed movies that is “trust me” better than what’s on Wikipedia and Box Office Mojo… really big red flag. I absolutely do not buy that the average profit is 3.7%. I worked on one of the movies he discusses (Shrek 2) and the paragraph about it is misleading, which for me makes me wonder how many other paragraphs are misleading. I also worked for a 2nd major film company and watched first-hand how they account for production budgets, which can involve trading costs with other nearby productions to make the expenses appear larger in order to do things like justify restructuring decisions, hide gains and losses, divert money toward or away from bonus pools. What really happens is impossible to know even as an insider, but the outcomes of this industry reveal that despite what they claim, it’s quite healthy for the big-budget crowd.
      - bruce511 4y ago
        It's worth understanding that "profit" is usually not the goal, and in any business can be easily made to go higher or lower. For example if I want my business to make more profit, I can stop paying me a salary. I can just take the same money out as profit. Or vice versa. Ultimately I end up optimising my salary/profit ratio according to the tax laws. Notice the studios managed to spend 8 billion on "other stuff". That's not "profit" (so less to pay people who have profit share) but it certainly went somewhere. And those feeding at the $8b trough certainly view big budget movies as a massive win. Sure Hollywood Accounting is well known, but it's no different to any business. Profit is a meaningless number and ultimately the flow of money is optimised for many other things.
  - npteljes 4y ago
    >Most of them have trouble ever making a profit They just do the accounting in a specific way to reduce taxes. It's on such a scale that it has its own name: Hollywood accounting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
- jerojero 4y ago
  Lots and I really do mean lots of drugs are funded almost entirely by governments and basic research at universities. Covid vaccines being one example. If you look at where the money for research comes (for new drugs, not for variation of existing drugs) from in big pharma you'll see a significant part of it is government money. But ethically do you think it is okay for big pharma to keep the intellectual property on medicine that can very well save lives? I think you have to make a very good case for patents being a force of innovation to justify keeping this medicine out of peoples reach. Let's not forget when bill gates spent millions of dollars distributing information in Africa against the copyright waiver the government was planning in order to make AIDS medicine affordable. Rent seeking on medication is, in my opinion, one of the worst use cases for copyright. And then, from there, isn't access to culture also a human right? Personally I think it is. Of course in our current societal and economic system it is extremely punishing to be an artist. But to me, that indicates there is something wrong with our system when artists have to rent seek or starve! We do have to question the basis of what makes our society tick more carefully. There are always trade offs, but I think the direction we've taken... The direction of strenghtening rent seeking behavior is probably at odds with creativity and freedom of expression. I mean, look at "memes". These images with funny text that people make. These are often anonymous pieces of work that are meant to be copied and distributed for free! I think the proliferation of talent and artwork is related to the disruption of access rather than copyright. Look at the amount of free work that is produced on the internet, from tiktok to memes to fanfiction. 60 years ago it took a lot to be a writer, publishing was very expensive so of course there needed to be a system to support that. But that's no longer the case, the internet gives you a way to reach millions of people instantly. Anything that can be digitalized is on a whole other level now. So to me, the cost of maintaining copyright has to be put in the balance with its benefits... And I'm not sure we wouldnt see big budget productions without it. I mean, wasnt game of thrones the most pirated show ever anyway?
- concordDance 4y ago
  If you abolished patents you'd have to reduce regulations on drug discovery enough that university teams can make new ones (like in the bad old days of the 1950s). Big budget movies we can just do without. On a related note: If you reduce the regulations on drugs you could go back to the good old days where new drugs cost under a hundred million dollars to make. This would let smaller companies make new drugs and drug companies would get slightly less insane margins (your average big pharma company gets $2 for shareholders for every $1 they spend on R&D, manufacturing, admin, advertising, etc).
  - andi999 4y ago
    A few more people might get damages from that, so lets hope they are in different countries /s
willcipriano 4y ago
It isn't 1900 anymore. With things with additive manufacturing and other innovations you can go from prototype to product faster than ever. A few year head start should be sufficient reward for most innovations. Perhaps you could handle the special cases (ie. somebody spends a billion dollars to invent a engine that runs on water) as one offs. Same with movies, television shows and music. They just don't have the impact they used to. You can do special effects for a few grand that cost a million dollars a few decades ago. As it is faster and easier than ever to make a movie, we don't need to offer such a long period of time for exclusivity.
- ghufran_syed 4y ago
  Any reason to think being creative in general is somehow easier for people than before? Whatever solution you offer should also apply to the base case which is writing a story or a song, both of which are “cheap” in terms of required tools and yet extremely difficult for most people to do well. So maybe we don’t want to discourage the creators just yet?
  - caconym_ 4y ago
    +1 People don't seem to consider what it would be like for authors (and similar) if copyright disappeared overnight: just as quickly, their work will be published and distributed by for-profit entities who can still turn a profit on it but don't have to give them a dime. Congratulations, you've made it impossible to make a living---or even part of one---as an author, except as an employee of a corporation that also controls distribution (e.g. your Disneys, your HBOs, and so on). I don't want to live in a world where the importance of storytelling [in media] is marginalized even further than it already is. A lot of people seem to have a "how hard could it be?" attitude toward it; the answer is, really fucking hard.
    - zozbot234 4y ago
      > People don't seem to consider what it would be like for authors (and similar) if copyright disappeared overnight We know very well what things were like pre-copyright. People still came up with compelling stories. Creativity flourished. Of course we've seen an increase since then, but that's the effect of industrialization and overall prosperity not copyright per se. > Congratulations, you've made it impossible to make a living---or even part of one---as an author The success of distributed patronage platforms like Kickstarter is a very real challenge to this assumption. People are in fact making a living by producing content that can be freely copied and distributed. Meanwhile, the average self-proclaimed author sees their content languishing in utter obscurity. This can hardly be called a "benefit" of copyright.
hovden 4y ago
Physical property and intellectual property are fundamentally different legally and philosophically. The terminology causes much confusion, especially among those with classical liberal leanings. https://c4sif.org/2022/01/natural-rights-scarcity-intellectual-property-by-kraft-hovden/ https://c4sif.org/2022/01/natural-rights-scarcity-intellectu...
- pas 4y ago
  sorry, could you somehow summarize it?
toss1 4y ago
I used to think that patents were essential, but the reality is that they don't provide much protection to ordinary inventors and are mostly used in rent-seeking and extractive behaviors by major entities. The reality is that a patent or copyright is not a protection, but just a ticket to a lawsuit. That lawsuit will take years and 6-figure dollars to prosecute to a usually unsatisfactory result. When it costs well into 5-figure dollars merely to get a patent, it's not worth it for a small inventor and is just the cost of business for a patent troll. Other than marketing value of "we have 5 patents on the tech in this product!", it's generally better to go trade secret, IMO... Copyright, is better in that it doesn't cost much to assert one, but going beyond a decade or two after the life of the author is again only something that favors some large corporate entities. Remember, the entire purpose of both of these is to benefit society and the country as a whole - to promote innovation. Promoting large corporations rent-seeking and extractive profits fails to do that.
- bruce511 4y ago
  >> Remember, the entire purpose of both of these is to benefit society and the country as a whole - to promote innovation This is inaccurate. Patents are designed to promote innovation. Copyrights are designed to promote creativity, not innovation. My novel is not innovative, it is creative. Copyrights allow me to monetize my creations if I choose to do so. Patents are designed for people to monetize invention. Conflating the two is both common, and unhelpful, as they both need different reforms in different aspects.
  - toss1 4y ago
    Of course they are distinct and need somewhat different reforms. However, they have much more in common They are both legal structures creating and enforcing the concept of "intellectual property" and supporting monetization of that property for the creators. I read the phrase "promote creativity" as indistinguishable from "promote innovation in the non-STEM (artistic, literary, etc.) fields" — sure, in general, "innovative" connotations differing from "creative", but in this discussion, it is a distinction without a difference. Maybe I'm missing something, and I agree that they both need reforms in different aspects, but that is primarily because they have different sets of laws, not because of some distinction between the two words you've highlighted.
readbeard 4y ago
Re: "intellectual property" and "piracy," I agree. The terms are problematic and misleading. How about "intellectual monopoly" and "infringement" as more accurate, neutral terms?
- bruce511 4y ago
  The concept of "intellectual property", which is a blanket term to include trade marks, copyright, patents, trade secrets and more is unhelpful because this covers multiple parts of the law, which were developed independently with different goals. While there is a lot of good in there, (not much complaint about trademarks), some mixed (copyright is good, 95 years is excessive), some bad (software patents) it's very mixed, and so lumping it all together as "intellectual property" is unhelpful. If for no other reason than it is too broad a topic that is too easily distracted to get anything resolved.
adamhi 4y ago
As far as I understand, there is no criminal penalty associated with patent infringement. With copyright violations you can in theory get prison time (as the warning on a DVD informs us), but it's very rare — on the order of a couple hundred people a year, and mostly for selling bootlegs, not for downloading movies off The Pirate Bay. I don't believe that the extra prison capacity required to house that many people is really much of an argument (even in small part) for removing all copyright and patent protections for everyone. Keep in mind that the work of every independent artist — writer, musician, game developer, whatever — is enabled by being able to sell their work, rather than have a perfect knockoff sold on Amazon for $.99 the day after it's released.
0dayz 4y ago
Ive always been in favor of the idea that only a person(s) can hold said copyright or patent and not the company, instead the company can have a license that protects their specific version of said work.

by efitz 4y ago

ChadNauseam 4y ago

How would you fund things like the discovery of new drugs, or the creation of big-budget movies, without parents and copyright respectively?

zozbot234 4y ago
New drugs are one thing (though even there, prizes and academic grants are a meaningful alternative to patent protection), but do we really need big-budget movies? They seem like a total waste. Most of them have trouble ever making a profit, and that's in spite of extreme levels of copyright enforcement (at least wrt. average users, not dedicated pirates).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dahart 4y ago
  > Most of them have trouble ever making a profit If that were true, most of the big-budget movie studios would be going out of business regularly. But that isn’t happening, by and large. They do sometimes want you to think they’re not making money. Having worked in the film & games industries, I’ve witnessed some of the creative accounting that gets used. > do we really need big-budget movies? They seem like a total waste. Well, people pay for them, and our IP laws are designed to protect the business of creations and inventions. Most of the pharma industry is also peddling stuff we don’t need and is wasteful, however it is big business.
  - rpdillon 4y ago
    They do make some money! > Here are the combined financial figures for all 29 Hollywood blockbusters (budgeted over $100m)… > Total combined budgets: $4.37 billion > Total combined costs (including budgets, marketing and all other costs): $11.52 billion > Total combined income (from all revenue streams): $11.95 billion > Profit across all movies: $428.9 million > An average profit of $14.8 million per movie The whole thing is an interesting read! https://stephenfollows.com/how-movies-make-money-hollywood-blockbusters/ https://stephenfollows.com/how-movies-make-money-hollywood-b...
    - dahart 4y ago
      It is interesting, but should be taken with a couple pretty big grains of salt IMO. It does a good job of discussing the many varied sources of cost and income. But the secret unsourced data of unnamed movies that is “trust me” better than what’s on Wikipedia and Box Office Mojo… really big red flag. I absolutely do not buy that the average profit is 3.7%. I worked on one of the movies he discusses (Shrek 2) and the paragraph about it is misleading, which for me makes me wonder how many other paragraphs are misleading. I also worked for a 2nd major film company and watched first-hand how they account for production budgets, which can involve trading costs with other nearby productions to make the expenses appear larger in order to do things like justify restructuring decisions, hide gains and losses, divert money toward or away from bonus pools. What really happens is impossible to know even as an insider, but the outcomes of this industry reveal that despite what they claim, it’s quite healthy for the big-budget crowd.
    - bruce511 4y ago
      It's worth understanding that "profit" is usually not the goal, and in any business can be easily made to go higher or lower. For example if I want my business to make more profit, I can stop paying me a salary. I can just take the same money out as profit. Or vice versa. Ultimately I end up optimising my salary/profit ratio according to the tax laws. Notice the studios managed to spend 8 billion on "other stuff". That's not "profit" (so less to pay people who have profit share) but it certainly went somewhere. And those feeding at the $8b trough certainly view big budget movies as a massive win. Sure Hollywood Accounting is well known, but it's no different to any business. Profit is a meaningless number and ultimately the flow of money is optimised for many other things.
- npteljes 4y ago
  >Most of them have trouble ever making a profit They just do the accounting in a specific way to reduce taxes. It's on such a scale that it has its own name: Hollywood accounting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
jerojero 4y ago
Lots and I really do mean lots of drugs are funded almost entirely by governments and basic research at universities. Covid vaccines being one example. If you look at where the money for research comes (for new drugs, not for variation of existing drugs) from in big pharma you'll see a significant part of it is government money. But ethically do you think it is okay for big pharma to keep the intellectual property on medicine that can very well save lives? I think you have to make a very good case for patents being a force of innovation to justify keeping this medicine out of peoples reach. Let's not forget when bill gates spent millions of dollars distributing information in Africa against the copyright waiver the government was planning in order to make AIDS medicine affordable. Rent seeking on medication is, in my opinion, one of the worst use cases for copyright. And then, from there, isn't access to culture also a human right? Personally I think it is. Of course in our current societal and economic system it is extremely punishing to be an artist. But to me, that indicates there is something wrong with our system when artists have to rent seek or starve! We do have to question the basis of what makes our society tick more carefully. There are always trade offs, but I think the direction we've taken... The direction of strenghtening rent seeking behavior is probably at odds with creativity and freedom of expression. I mean, look at "memes". These images with funny text that people make. These are often anonymous pieces of work that are meant to be copied and distributed for free! I think the proliferation of talent and artwork is related to the disruption of access rather than copyright. Look at the amount of free work that is produced on the internet, from tiktok to memes to fanfiction. 60 years ago it took a lot to be a writer, publishing was very expensive so of course there needed to be a system to support that. But that's no longer the case, the internet gives you a way to reach millions of people instantly. Anything that can be digitalized is on a whole other level now. So to me, the cost of maintaining copyright has to be put in the balance with its benefits... And I'm not sure we wouldnt see big budget productions without it. I mean, wasnt game of thrones the most pirated show ever anyway?
concordDance 4y ago
If you abolished patents you'd have to reduce regulations on drug discovery enough that university teams can make new ones (like in the bad old days of the 1950s). Big budget movies we can just do without. On a related note: If you reduce the regulations on drugs you could go back to the good old days where new drugs cost under a hundred million dollars to make. This would let smaller companies make new drugs and drug companies would get slightly less insane margins (your average big pharma company gets $2 for shareholders for every $1 they spend on R&D, manufacturing, admin, advertising, etc).
- andi999 4y ago
  A few more people might get damages from that, so lets hope they are in different countries /s

willcipriano 4y ago

It isn't 1900 anymore. With things with additive manufacturing and other innovations you can go from prototype to product faster than ever. A few year head start should be sufficient reward for most innovations. Perhaps you could handle the special cases (ie. somebody spends a billion dollars to invent a engine that runs on water) as one offs. Same with movies, television shows and music. They just don't have the impact they used to. You can do special effects for a few grand that cost a million dollars a few decades ago. As it is faster and easier than ever to make a movie, we don't need to offer such a long period of time for exclusivity.

ghufran_syed 4y ago
Any reason to think being creative in general is somehow easier for people than before? Whatever solution you offer should also apply to the base case which is writing a story or a song, both of which are “cheap” in terms of required tools and yet extremely difficult for most people to do well. So maybe we don’t want to discourage the creators just yet?
- caconym_ 4y ago
  +1 People don't seem to consider what it would be like for authors (and similar) if copyright disappeared overnight: just as quickly, their work will be published and distributed by for-profit entities who can still turn a profit on it but don't have to give them a dime. Congratulations, you've made it impossible to make a living---or even part of one---as an author, except as an employee of a corporation that also controls distribution (e.g. your Disneys, your HBOs, and so on). I don't want to live in a world where the importance of storytelling [in media] is marginalized even further than it already is. A lot of people seem to have a "how hard could it be?" attitude toward it; the answer is, really fucking hard.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    > People don't seem to consider what it would be like for authors (and similar) if copyright disappeared overnight We know very well what things were like pre-copyright. People still came up with compelling stories. Creativity flourished. Of course we've seen an increase since then, but that's the effect of industrialization and overall prosperity not copyright per se. > Congratulations, you've made it impossible to make a living---or even part of one---as an author The success of distributed patronage platforms like Kickstarter is a very real challenge to this assumption. People are in fact making a living by producing content that can be freely copied and distributed. Meanwhile, the average self-proclaimed author sees their content languishing in utter obscurity. This can hardly be called a "benefit" of copyright.

hovden 4y ago

Physical property and intellectual property are fundamentally different legally and philosophically. The terminology causes much confusion, especially among those with classical liberal leanings. https://c4sif.org/2022/01/natural-rights-scarcity-intellectual-property-by-kraft-hovden/ https://c4sif.org/2022/01/natural-rights-scarcity-intellectu...

pas 4y ago
sorry, could you somehow summarize it?

toss1 4y ago

I used to think that patents were essential, but the reality is that they don't provide much protection to ordinary inventors and are mostly used in rent-seeking and extractive behaviors by major entities. The reality is that a patent or copyright is not a protection, but just a ticket to a lawsuit. That lawsuit will take years and 6-figure dollars to prosecute to a usually unsatisfactory result. When it costs well into 5-figure dollars merely to get a patent, it's not worth it for a small inventor and is just the cost of business for a patent troll. Other than marketing value of "we have 5 patents on the tech in this product!", it's generally better to go trade secret, IMO... Copyright, is better in that it doesn't cost much to assert one, but going beyond a decade or two after the life of the author is again only something that favors some large corporate entities. Remember, the entire purpose of both of these is to benefit society and the country as a whole - to promote innovation. Promoting large corporations rent-seeking and extractive profits fails to do that.

bruce511 4y ago
>> Remember, the entire purpose of both of these is to benefit society and the country as a whole - to promote innovation This is inaccurate. Patents are designed to promote innovation. Copyrights are designed to promote creativity, not innovation. My novel is not innovative, it is creative. Copyrights allow me to monetize my creations if I choose to do so. Patents are designed for people to monetize invention. Conflating the two is both common, and unhelpful, as they both need different reforms in different aspects.
- toss1 4y ago
  Of course they are distinct and need somewhat different reforms. However, they have much more in common They are both legal structures creating and enforcing the concept of "intellectual property" and supporting monetization of that property for the creators. I read the phrase "promote creativity" as indistinguishable from "promote innovation in the non-STEM (artistic, literary, etc.) fields" — sure, in general, "innovative" connotations differing from "creative", but in this discussion, it is a distinction without a difference. Maybe I'm missing something, and I agree that they both need reforms in different aspects, but that is primarily because they have different sets of laws, not because of some distinction between the two words you've highlighted.

readbeard 4y ago

Re: "intellectual property" and "piracy," I agree. The terms are problematic and misleading. How about "intellectual monopoly" and "infringement" as more accurate, neutral terms?

bruce511 4y ago
The concept of "intellectual property", which is a blanket term to include trade marks, copyright, patents, trade secrets and more is unhelpful because this covers multiple parts of the law, which were developed independently with different goals. While there is a lot of good in there, (not much complaint about trademarks), some mixed (copyright is good, 95 years is excessive), some bad (software patents) it's very mixed, and so lumping it all together as "intellectual property" is unhelpful. If for no other reason than it is too broad a topic that is too easily distracted to get anything resolved.

adamhi 4y ago

As far as I understand, there is no criminal penalty associated with patent infringement. With copyright violations you can in theory get prison time (as the warning on a DVD informs us), but it's very rare — on the order of a couple hundred people a year, and mostly for selling bootlegs, not for downloading movies off The Pirate Bay. I don't believe that the extra prison capacity required to house that many people is really much of an argument (even in small part) for removing all copyright and patent protections for everyone. Keep in mind that the work of every independent artist — writer, musician, game developer, whatever — is enabled by being able to sell their work, rather than have a perfect knockoff sold on Amazon for $.99 the day after it's released.

0dayz 4y ago

Ive always been in favor of the idea that only a person(s) can hold said copyright or patent and not the company, instead the company can have a license that protects their specific version of said work.