5 ms·

We honestly need to rethink intellectual property from top to bottom, it’s not just copyright and not just music, it’s so much more and it affects every single

We honestly need to rethink intellectual property from top to bottom, it’s not just copyright and not just music, it’s so much more and it affects every single kind of IP: Patent trolls, overly broad and vague patents that stifle innovation and prevent competition. Amazon should never have got a patent on 1-Click purchases and hardware shouldn’t be impossible to enter due to entrenched players’ deep patent portfolios. Overextending trademark, look up all the ways Monster Beverages tries to abuse their “Monster” trademark, just as one example. Copyright is used to stifle innovation in the arts as seen here. It keeps works out of the public domain for way too long as well. Not only do these directly cause harm but they create chilling effects due to how they let the legal system be weaponized in their defense. Even if I would win a lawsuit regarding whether I’m allowed to do something, I might still let a big player bully me out of it because of the risk and asymmetric cost of going to court. This generates a huge amount of friction. Without our current IP system you would not have all these abusive middle men in publishing, music, or other media. Not only are they stifling new art, they’re benefitting from IP by using it take a huge cut directly from artists per their contracts. Trade secrets, allowing for reverse engineering but not direct espionage, are IMO the only kind of IP that we should allow as-is. Everything else needs to be thrown out and potentially replaced with something else less abusable - I think Netflix should be allowed to fund a big movie and recoup the costs fairly without it being immediately ripped and given away for free, but they shouldn’t get to bully people making similar content or even content extending the IP.

AlbertCory 3y ago
How much do you think the lawyers care what HN'ers think? Read this for some honest takes. They don't even care. https://www.reddit.com/r/patentlaw/comments/12x4361/alice_failed_now_what/ https://www.reddit.com/r/patentlaw/comments/12x4361/alice_fa...
- arp242 3y ago
  Well, that article also wasn't very good. The condescending attitude towards anyone who isn't an engineer is palatable, even to an engineer like me. The discussion on Reddit is mostly constructive in spite of this. The suggestion that HN is somehow representative of "engineers" in general is just not true. While HN includes many people with all sorts of opinions, the average is quite biased, especially on topics like this.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    Still plenty of time for you to weigh in there.
- solveit 3y ago
  The lawyers came out of that one looking pretty good, to be honest...
- zarzavat 3y ago
  What a bunch of condescending assholes in that thread! They don’t respect us at all. Fortunately the engineers control the RLHF of their replacement :)
- dmoy 3y ago
  r/patentlaw is closer to /r/CScareerquestions than anything else I think it's true that patent lawyers don't give a shit what HNers think, but I don't think that stuff posted to reddit is a good benchmark either
jimbob45 3y ago
We spent the Trump years strongarming the rest of the world into uniform copyright laws. What happens now? “JK guys actually you can forget about what we said”. It seems that the only real option is to maintain copyright laws for all other countries while shortening your own. It seems like a huge competitive disadvantage for a country to be the first to do that.
- amw 3y ago
  Trump wasn't particularly special for this. In fact, by tanking TPP, he actually stopped at least one massive tool for curtailing IP sovereignty. Not making a flattering statement about Trump here, just that _he_ wasn't _the problem_, in this and other things. That said, "jk guys actually you can forget about what we said" would be fantastic for this and many other things our government has made part of its international doctrine, and might be a thing it would even do if our government had any interest in governing for our benefit rather than for a tiny minority.
notatoad 3y ago
if you propose any reforms to the intellectual property schemes at all, musicians will be the first to be protesting that. the system allows all kinds of abuse, but it also greatly benefits anybody who makes their living through intellectual property, at the expense of all the rest of us. this specific time it hurts Ed Sheeran, but it's also made him a lot of money. and we all care about it this time because it affects somebody famous enough for us to care, but all those "chilling effects" already exist and art and creativity is stifled every day to protect the rich and famous (and their heirs)
wpietri 3y ago
What makes you think some other new system will be less abusable? Any new system will be dropped in among a lot of people who made their livings from abuse and will be very eager to keep doing so. The whole "X is bad, so let's reinvent it from scratch" doesn't have a great track record. An obvious example is the way the cryptocurrency space has spent the last 15-years speed-running the discovery of why a financial regulatory system is in fact valuable. And as Mike Masnick pointed out, we see it over and over in the social media space. [1] Or we might look at the Russian and Chinese revolutions. Obviously, we should look at the way the current IP system is being misused or is suboptimal and improve it. But trying to rebuild it from scratch could end up worse even if every current bad actor wouldn't be vigorously lobbying to make abuse easier in the new version. And they certainly would. [1] https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/ https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...
- opportune 3y ago
  I don’t see a way to iterate out of the current IP system because it benefits incumbents too much. It’s like with switching from property taxes to (Georgist) land value taxes or even ending NIMBY-ism, the people it benefits are the ones with the least power, and more importantly the exact people it’s stifling don’t even know it’s stifling them (who knows which entrepreneurs will benefit from relaxing the rules, and how exactly that will benefit consumers?). Especially in our current political system where money = the size of your political voice, there’s a lot of power that would oppose it. Securitizing part of the commons creates clear winners who’ll defend their assets, but returning those assets to the commons basically destroys an asset in a way with harder to understand benefits. Also, the current IP system is in a way a form of protectionism that benefits mostly Western companies (at the expense of mostly western consumers). Piecemeal iteration towards allowing more profits to be captured by developing countries vs American companies… you’d need to make a bigger change that clearly benefits western consumers more than it harms them. I’m not saying we need a communist revolution lol, but I do think we need to start by reasoning from the fundamental outcomes we want to incentivize and consider how a replacement system incentivizes those vs undesirable outcomes. For example, I think approximately no author (yes I know this applies to a couple of Tolkien’s pieces) is factoring in whether their IP lasts 25 years vs 75 years into their decision to write something. And I think it’s safe to say that patents, in at least most domains I’m familiar with, do much more to stifle actual entrepreneurship than to incentivize it.
mjevans 3y ago
Fine, I'll take a stab at some numbers. Copy Right : Automatic, limit to 20 years. For more than 20 years each YEAR a tax of 2^(years of copyright, starting at 21) dollars PLUS 2^(Cyears - 20)% sales. Thus for year 21 this would be ~2million + 2% of sales. Year 25 would be ~33.5 million + 32% of sales. Year 26 would be 64% of sales, and year 27+ would be pointless. Trade Mark : Unlimited number of years, BUT, must be filed every year. Some sort of small filing fee per mark (more costly than the government processing, this is also to protect name-space pollution) plus 1% (* edit: n%) of sales on any TMed product. EDIT: * The additional tax per product should just be a flat n%, maybe even less than 1%. The administrative overhead of having different tax rates outweighs any benefits with my initial thoughts of a cap at 2%. Character and Likeness things would all file under the consumer protection of Trade Mark. Patents do not exist anymore, in the modern age no patent describes the 'useful art' in a way that is useful to anyone practicing that art in the scientific / applied engineering fields who should benefit from it, so it is unconstitutional by definition. Discuss and adjust the copyright duration and post-free copyright numbers according to real incentive (IMO even 20 years is too long and should be ramped down to more like a decade, but the 'back end' of exponential fee increase should be stretched out to around 30 years total). Ah also, REGISTRATION of the copyright should lead to triple (actual) damages for infringement. Registration would also include filing with the National Library and an association of libraries, an archive copy of the work with is unencumbered by copyright and free of any 'DRM' or other 'protection mechanisms'; to be 'unsealed' after it becomes public domain.
- zarzavat 3y ago
  I like this idea. If companies want to own the commons they should pay a tax to us as compensation. The current system is one of unlimited freeloading, we give away our commons for free and Big Mouse makes the $$$.
  - dcow 3y ago
    Yes. We’re getting royally ripped off. This is where you need to start the thought train to get people to see that fundamental change is needed. Everything else is downstream from the fact that people don't understand they’re giving away ownership of common property to others for free. It’s absurd.
WheelsAtLarge 3y ago
1-Click may seem obvious. But then why did no one come up with it before? You can say the same for a paperclip and I'm sure there are countless more. I'm open to patents that seem obvious. Sometimes novel and obvious ideas are there but it takes a special spark to get them defined and known. I will take 100 useless and obvious ideas, if it means we get 1 useful never seen one that helps us. By the way, "obvious" is only seen after it is presented. Think about it in these terms. There are math problems that seem impossible to solve yet once the answer is presented one wonders why they did not come up with the answer since the answer seems so obvious. Patents and copyrights are so important that they are part of the US Constitution. I'm one that believes that they are a must for a working economy that produces products that we need. There are countless of products that would not exist if we did not have them. Many of the pharmaceuticals that require billions of dollars would not be available without IP protection. I would even question the whole music business and its many unique songs that are only produce with the hope that they become hits and the money that comes with it that lets artists support themselves. The problem is not Copyrights and Patents but the way businesses have captured the implementation of the laws around them. That's where the reform should happen. A company should not have the power to rewrite IP laws to favor themselves.
- BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
  > 1-Click may seem obvious. But then why did no one come up with it before? There probably weren't that many other e-commerce outfits at the time with a customer base made up of frequent/repeat buyers (to a degree that would motivate the designers to opt for it). The first store to put a big red sign with its name above its entrance shouldn't necessarily be granted the exclusive privilege of doing so for the next N years.
- chrismcb 3y ago
  Because we all thought it was stupid (keeping track of credit cards and other issues). There wasn't anything novel about one click. My personal opinion is, copyright needs to be shortened. Patents harder to get. Trademarks are mostly fine.
- TylerE 3y ago
  My favorite, somewhat memey but factually correct example is that we put men on the moon before we put wheels on luggage. The modern, two wheeled with handle "tipper" style didn't come onto the market until 1987.
irjustin 3y ago
You're listing all the problems (which everyone will readily agree) but what is the solution? > Everything else needs to be thrown out and potentially replaced with something else less abusable - I think Netflix should be allowed to fund a big movie and recoup the costs fairly without it being immediately ripped and given away for free, but they shouldn’t get to bully people making similar content or even content extending the IP. You actually state almost the exact problem that's makes IP law so impossible to do at scale. Like it's easy to distinguish between similar content, extending content vs ripping content. Pure ripping is easy, but step outside of that, when is it "similar vs ripping". When is it right to use a DCMA takedown? Is it because a song had a similar 4 note progression? is it 5 notes? is it "tonality" of those notes", the "interval", what makes it "recognizable"? When is a patent the same as another? When is it different? Look at fasteners. There's an insane amount of patents for fasteners. Some are truly novel for very specific purposes I say it's a special fastener for vibrations in microgravity. Space fastener! Great, that's unique! Oh and it also works well in 1G. hrm..... Once a patent is issued, how do you know who it belongs to? The person who made it, cool that's great. But let's say he doesn't have the ability to manufacture, so he sells the patent. Now you've got your proper buyers vs trolls. It's easy to say "let's get rid of it!" and not consider the depth of the problem at hand.
- blakewatson 3y ago
  I may be misunderstanding, but I was thinking the commenter meant "ripping" as in ripping a DVD, as opposed to "ripping off of." So "immediately ripped and given away for free" meaning someone shouldn't be able to immediately distribute the recording outside of Netflix.
  - irjustin 3y ago
    Agreed, and my comment to that end was: > Pure ripping is easy As in, that's easy to distinguish. But, take a single step away from image-for-image or byte-for-byte copy and it gets hard real fast. That's where all the problem lies, right? That when is something not-a-direct-copy but still infringes-on-the-original? And that's what I'm trying to highlight. My "space fastener" from earlier is unique because it does novel things (for arguments sake). But once I add "it works in 1G" well it's going up against a whole bunch of other nuts/bolts. I'm hoping to help convince you that it's more than surface deep - is all.

AlbertCory 3y ago

How much do you think the lawyers care what HN'ers think? Read this for some honest takes. They don't even care. https://www.reddit.com/r/patentlaw/comments/12x4361/alice_failed_now_what/ https://www.reddit.com/r/patentlaw/comments/12x4361/alice_fa...

arp242 3y ago
Well, that article also wasn't very good. The condescending attitude towards anyone who isn't an engineer is palatable, even to an engineer like me. The discussion on Reddit is mostly constructive in spite of this. The suggestion that HN is somehow representative of "engineers" in general is just not true. While HN includes many people with all sorts of opinions, the average is quite biased, especially on topics like this.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  Still plenty of time for you to weigh in there.
solveit 3y ago
The lawyers came out of that one looking pretty good, to be honest...
zarzavat 3y ago
What a bunch of condescending assholes in that thread! They don’t respect us at all. Fortunately the engineers control the RLHF of their replacement :)
dmoy 3y ago
r/patentlaw is closer to /r/CScareerquestions than anything else I think it's true that patent lawyers don't give a shit what HNers think, but I don't think that stuff posted to reddit is a good benchmark either

jimbob45 3y ago

We spent the Trump years strongarming the rest of the world into uniform copyright laws. What happens now? “JK guys actually you can forget about what we said”. It seems that the only real option is to maintain copyright laws for all other countries while shortening your own. It seems like a huge competitive disadvantage for a country to be the first to do that.

amw 3y ago
Trump wasn't particularly special for this. In fact, by tanking TPP, he actually stopped at least one massive tool for curtailing IP sovereignty. Not making a flattering statement about Trump here, just that _he_ wasn't _the problem_, in this and other things. That said, "jk guys actually you can forget about what we said" would be fantastic for this and many other things our government has made part of its international doctrine, and might be a thing it would even do if our government had any interest in governing for our benefit rather than for a tiny minority.

notatoad 3y ago

if you propose any reforms to the intellectual property schemes at all, musicians will be the first to be protesting that. the system allows all kinds of abuse, but it also greatly benefits anybody who makes their living through intellectual property, at the expense of all the rest of us. this specific time it hurts Ed Sheeran, but it's also made him a lot of money. and we all care about it this time because it affects somebody famous enough for us to care, but all those "chilling effects" already exist and art and creativity is stifled every day to protect the rich and famous (and their heirs)

wpietri 3y ago

What makes you think some other new system will be less abusable? Any new system will be dropped in among a lot of people who made their livings from abuse and will be very eager to keep doing so. The whole "X is bad, so let's reinvent it from scratch" doesn't have a great track record. An obvious example is the way the cryptocurrency space has spent the last 15-years speed-running the discovery of why a financial regulatory system is in fact valuable. And as Mike Masnick pointed out, we see it over and over in the social media space. [1] Or we might look at the Russian and Chinese revolutions. Obviously, we should look at the way the current IP system is being misused or is suboptimal and improve it. But trying to rebuild it from scratch could end up worse even if every current bad actor wouldn't be vigorously lobbying to make abuse easier in the new version. And they certainly would. [1] https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/ https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...

opportune 3y ago
I don’t see a way to iterate out of the current IP system because it benefits incumbents too much. It’s like with switching from property taxes to (Georgist) land value taxes or even ending NIMBY-ism, the people it benefits are the ones with the least power, and more importantly the exact people it’s stifling don’t even know it’s stifling them (who knows which entrepreneurs will benefit from relaxing the rules, and how exactly that will benefit consumers?). Especially in our current political system where money = the size of your political voice, there’s a lot of power that would oppose it. Securitizing part of the commons creates clear winners who’ll defend their assets, but returning those assets to the commons basically destroys an asset in a way with harder to understand benefits. Also, the current IP system is in a way a form of protectionism that benefits mostly Western companies (at the expense of mostly western consumers). Piecemeal iteration towards allowing more profits to be captured by developing countries vs American companies… you’d need to make a bigger change that clearly benefits western consumers more than it harms them. I’m not saying we need a communist revolution lol, but I do think we need to start by reasoning from the fundamental outcomes we want to incentivize and consider how a replacement system incentivizes those vs undesirable outcomes. For example, I think approximately no author (yes I know this applies to a couple of Tolkien’s pieces) is factoring in whether their IP lasts 25 years vs 75 years into their decision to write something. And I think it’s safe to say that patents, in at least most domains I’m familiar with, do much more to stifle actual entrepreneurship than to incentivize it.

mjevans 3y ago

Fine, I'll take a stab at some numbers. Copy Right : Automatic, limit to 20 years. For more than 20 years each YEAR a tax of 2^(years of copyright, starting at 21) dollars PLUS 2^(Cyears - 20)% sales. Thus for year 21 this would be ~2million + 2% of sales. Year 25 would be ~33.5 million + 32% of sales. Year 26 would be 64% of sales, and year 27+ would be pointless. Trade Mark : Unlimited number of years, BUT, must be filed every year. Some sort of small filing fee per mark (more costly than the government processing, this is also to protect name-space pollution) plus 1% (* edit: n%) of sales on any TMed product. EDIT: * The additional tax per product should just be a flat n%, maybe even less than 1%. The administrative overhead of having different tax rates outweighs any benefits with my initial thoughts of a cap at 2%. Character and Likeness things would all file under the consumer protection of Trade Mark. Patents do not exist anymore, in the modern age no patent describes the 'useful art' in a way that is useful to anyone practicing that art in the scientific / applied engineering fields who should benefit from it, so it is unconstitutional by definition. Discuss and adjust the copyright duration and post-free copyright numbers according to real incentive (IMO even 20 years is too long and should be ramped down to more like a decade, but the 'back end' of exponential fee increase should be stretched out to around 30 years total). Ah also, REGISTRATION of the copyright should lead to triple (actual) damages for infringement. Registration would also include filing with the National Library and an association of libraries, an archive copy of the work with is unencumbered by copyright and free of any 'DRM' or other 'protection mechanisms'; to be 'unsealed' after it becomes public domain.

zarzavat 3y ago
I like this idea. If companies want to own the commons they should pay a tax to us as compensation. The current system is one of unlimited freeloading, we give away our commons for free and Big Mouse makes the $$$.
- dcow 3y ago
  Yes. We’re getting royally ripped off. This is where you need to start the thought train to get people to see that fundamental change is needed. Everything else is downstream from the fact that people don't understand they’re giving away ownership of common property to others for free. It’s absurd.

WheelsAtLarge 3y ago

1-Click may seem obvious. But then why did no one come up with it before? You can say the same for a paperclip and I'm sure there are countless more. I'm open to patents that seem obvious. Sometimes novel and obvious ideas are there but it takes a special spark to get them defined and known. I will take 100 useless and obvious ideas, if it means we get 1 useful never seen one that helps us. By the way, "obvious" is only seen after it is presented. Think about it in these terms. There are math problems that seem impossible to solve yet once the answer is presented one wonders why they did not come up with the answer since the answer seems so obvious. Patents and copyrights are so important that they are part of the US Constitution. I'm one that believes that they are a must for a working economy that produces products that we need. There are countless of products that would not exist if we did not have them. Many of the pharmaceuticals that require billions of dollars would not be available without IP protection. I would even question the whole music business and its many unique songs that are only produce with the hope that they become hits and the money that comes with it that lets artists support themselves. The problem is not Copyrights and Patents but the way businesses have captured the implementation of the laws around them. That's where the reform should happen. A company should not have the power to rewrite IP laws to favor themselves.

BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
> 1-Click may seem obvious. But then why did no one come up with it before? There probably weren't that many other e-commerce outfits at the time with a customer base made up of frequent/repeat buyers (to a degree that would motivate the designers to opt for it). The first store to put a big red sign with its name above its entrance shouldn't necessarily be granted the exclusive privilege of doing so for the next N years.
chrismcb 3y ago
Because we all thought it was stupid (keeping track of credit cards and other issues). There wasn't anything novel about one click. My personal opinion is, copyright needs to be shortened. Patents harder to get. Trademarks are mostly fine.
TylerE 3y ago
My favorite, somewhat memey but factually correct example is that we put men on the moon before we put wheels on luggage. The modern, two wheeled with handle "tipper" style didn't come onto the market until 1987.

irjustin 3y ago

You're listing all the problems (which everyone will readily agree) but what is the solution? > Everything else needs to be thrown out and potentially replaced with something else less abusable - I think Netflix should be allowed to fund a big movie and recoup the costs fairly without it being immediately ripped and given away for free, but they shouldn’t get to bully people making similar content or even content extending the IP. You actually state almost the exact problem that's makes IP law so impossible to do at scale. Like it's easy to distinguish between similar content, extending content vs ripping content. Pure ripping is easy, but step outside of that, when is it "similar vs ripping". When is it right to use a DCMA takedown? Is it because a song had a similar 4 note progression? is it 5 notes? is it "tonality" of those notes", the "interval", what makes it "recognizable"? When is a patent the same as another? When is it different? Look at fasteners. There's an insane amount of patents for fasteners. Some are truly novel for very specific purposes I say it's a special fastener for vibrations in microgravity. Space fastener! Great, that's unique! Oh and it also works well in 1G. hrm..... Once a patent is issued, how do you know who it belongs to? The person who made it, cool that's great. But let's say he doesn't have the ability to manufacture, so he sells the patent. Now you've got your proper buyers vs trolls. It's easy to say "let's get rid of it!" and not consider the depth of the problem at hand.

blakewatson 3y ago
I may be misunderstanding, but I was thinking the commenter meant "ripping" as in ripping a DVD, as opposed to "ripping off of." So "immediately ripped and given away for free" meaning someone shouldn't be able to immediately distribute the recording outside of Netflix.
- irjustin 3y ago
  Agreed, and my comment to that end was: > Pure ripping is easy As in, that's easy to distinguish. But, take a single step away from image-for-image or byte-for-byte copy and it gets hard real fast. That's where all the problem lies, right? That when is something not-a-direct-copy but still infringes-on-the-original? And that's what I'm trying to highlight. My "space fastener" from earlier is unique because it does novel things (for arguments sake). But once I add "it works in 1G" well it's going up against a whole bunch of other nuts/bolts. I'm hoping to help convince you that it's more than surface deep - is all.