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> The entire tech industry is built on intellectual property. That's absolute bullshit. Companies used to provide detailed schematics. Source code was shared
by rglullis 3y ago
> The entire tech industry is built on intellectual property.
That's absolute bullshit.
Companies used to provide detailed schematics. Source code was shared freely by manufacturers. Micro-soft (when they had the hyphen) was one of the first to push for this change and responsible for making things "closed", writing letters to people asking them to stop making unlicensed copies of their Basic compiler.
- lockhouse 3y agoThe hardware companies still made heavy use of intellectual property. IBM mainframes were heavily patented. The manuals they shipped with were copyrighted. The software was just mostly seen as an implementation detail and its value independent of hardware hadn’t occurred to most people yet. Also, like it not, companies like Microsoft drove the tech industry forward during the eighties and nineties because of them creating an industry where software has its own monetary value independent of the hardware it ships with. Even open source as we know it would not exist without intellectual property laws. The GPL and similar licenses are only enforceable because of copyright.
- rglullis 3y agoAlright, then the argument becomes "why should we care about the industry?" Much like Big Tech, I would be happy to see the complete obliteration of Hollywood.