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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) la
by 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.
- wpietri 3y agoSorry, but I don't see an answer to my question, so I'll ask it again: What makes you think some other new system will be less abusable?
- opportune 3y agoFor starters we can learn from the failings of our current system - it does some things well, but clearly it incentivizes things we should not be incentivizing, and I argue it disincentivizes some of what it think it’s incentivizing (entrepreneurship). Second-mover advantage and all that. Another potential reason a replacement would be less abusable is that, if the replacement does away with IP middlemen (patent trolls, record labels making huge profits off what are effectively payday loans to artists, conglomerates like Disney acquiring as much IP in some domains as they can) we could avoid the situation where extractive elements lobby for increasingly more extractive laws or policies or throw their weight around in a way to create unfair outcomes. I’d like to add our current system is something we’ve progressively iterated towards through centuries of common law (originating from before the Industrial Revolution and even such radical concepts as “widespread literacy” or “less than 90% of people being farmers”). It has accumulated cruft and crap and comes from a time where creative work was proportionately a less important part of the economy, and is a product of centuries of influence from incumbents seeking regulatory capture. Just weakening those incumbents and giving them less of a snowball to roll down the hill would lessen abuse for the time being.
- wpietri 3y agoSorry, but as I said, those people will still exist on day 1 of the new regime. And they'll be lobbying hard between now and day 1. It's at least as plausible to me that starting fresh will be more abuseable, because you're going from a situation with lots of data on abuse modes to one with no data. It's a bet that you (or somebody) is going to be smarter than the real world, which is a bet that rarely works out.
- int_19h 3y agoIt would be if we make it explicit that there is no right to profit from creativity - the sole purpose of the system should be to maximize the total creative output for the benefit of the commons.