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If anything - this entire conversation just highlights (Over and Over and Over and Over again) how absolutely bonkers abusive our current copyright laws are. T

If anything - this entire conversation just highlights (Over and Over and Over and Over again) how absolutely bonkers abusive our current copyright laws are. The vast majority of small individuals are compelled by contract to surrender their rights to large corporations. Those large corporations then abuse the ever loving fuck out of those rights. The express intent of copyright is now a sad joke. Personally - I'm pretty over the entire show. This system is generating an incredible amount of inequality. New and novel content is absolutely NOT getting made, and these laws are creating vicious infights that drain resources from well intentioned companies & individuals and pass them along to complete scam corporations. We are told stories as children that we cannot retell in our own voices decades later to our own children. I am firmly ready to burn this copyright system to the fucking ground. It's been 300 years since the Statute of Anne - I'm ready for a different game.

PartiallyTyped 3y ago
There is also the whole patent / copyright trolling issue too. The fact that $BIG_CORP can hire armies of lawyers to freeze competitors and beat them to market by filing frivolous lawsuits is yet another example of insanity in the whole system.
- chongli 3y ago
  I recently watched the documentary Fire in the Blood (2013) [1] about the use, by big pharma, of patents and WIPO to obstruct access to affordable antiretrovirals (ARVs) in Africa during the worst years of the AIDS epidemic, leading to over ten million deaths. All of this when the African market for these medications represented less than 1% of the total market, in dollars. It’s absolutely infuriating! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_in_the_Blood_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_in_the_Blood_(2013_film)
- drdaeman 3y ago
  It's a problem with legal system (not unique to any specific country, mind you, the problem is global), not patent or copyright system specifically. It grew incredible amounts of complexity so pro se became a sad joke in all but simplest cases, and there's no incentive to fix it - quite the opposite, everyone in the system is all for keeping the status quo, because it generates money.
  - jrumbut 3y ago
    But there are specific problems with copyright and patent law that could be improved without a global systemic overhaul that may never happen. We have to take some small wins even in the presence of big problems.
    - drdaeman 3y ago
      Of course. I'm just saying that the core problem is larger than just the copyright and patent law.
  - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
    Personally I don’t think patents do what people believe they do (encourage innovation). It’s a bigger discussion but briefly, the only literal function of a patent is to discourage innovation by legally barring anyone from using a patented idea as part of a new innovation. The idea we have is that the secondary effects of this will be increased profits for inventors and therefore more innovation. But actually there’s loads of secondary effects and often many of them outweigh the effect of increased profit. For every one inventor that gets a patent there might be 100 prevented from using that idea in a different and innovative way. A classic example is 3D printers. Stratasys spent 15 years selling printers that cost tens of thousands of dollars. It wasn’t until the patent expired that people figured out how to make them for $250. Those cheaper printers are enabling mechanical engineers and designers to accelerate their process and make other new innovations faster. Stratasys had such a powerful patent they never bothered innovating down in price, instead rested on their laurels selling $25k printers to big customers. So how many inventions were delayed or shelved because the inventors couldn’t afford a $25,000 3D printer, and $250 printers didn’t exist yet? Both Stratasys and IBM held patents related to 3D printing and they had to cross license to go in to production, so how many others would have come up with 3D printing in the 1990’s if they had not been patented? Would first mover advantage in a free market have been enough to stimulate development of 3D printers? Could we have had $2000 3D printers in the early 2000’s (Stratasys sold theirs for $30k) instead of ten years later? How many engineers would have invented new gadgets faster if they had a 3D printer ten years earlier?
loudmax 3y ago
Fully agree that the existing copyright and intellectual property systems are dire need of deep reform. But to get people on board, you can't just propose burning it all down, you need to point to a viable alternative. Say, limiting copyrights to something sane like 15 or 30 years. Or making it easier to invalidate obvious or trivial patents. Or do you really want to do away with notions of intellectual property altogether? You can make an argument for that, but there would lead to deep economic changes, and you need to anticipate what the end result would look like. You still need some way to encourage the creation of new content. Pointing out that our copyright/IP system is broken is easy. And you're right, it's totally broken! Coming up with a fix is hard work.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  I don’t think we need to use the legal system to encourage creation of new content! That’s a natural thing people do. In fact there’s a lot of artistic remixing that is illegal or ambiguously legal under the current copyright regime that can be a powerful form of expression. I really don’t think we need government policy to encourage artists to create art. (At least not of this sort - I am all for art grants.)
- Zaskoda 3y ago
  > But to get people on board, you can't just propose burning it all down, you need to point to a viable alternative. This may be true for most people, I don't know. However, I personally am fully on board the "burn it all down" train and have been for a while.
- capr 3y ago
  Pointing out that IP is broken is _not_ easy because most people believe in the contradictory notion of intellectual property, you included, not knowing the legal history of IP, the legal and economic history of the concept of property, and so on. If it were easy, it would be obvious to everybody that 1) IP law is immoral and 2) nothing bad would happen if it's abolished outright. Here's a free ebook on the subject, written by a patent lawyer no less: https://mises.org/library/against-intellectual-property-0 https://mises.org/library/against-intellectual-property-0
111111IIIIIII 3y ago
> I am firmly ready to burn this copyright system to the fucking ground. Same, but the issue is not copyright, which is simply an effort to wield the state to control intellectual property in the same way the state is wielded to control physical property. The compounding problem arises when property is capital, defined as the means to convert labor into new value. Capitalism is specifically a system in which one can wield control of capital (intellectual or otherwise) to extract profit from labor then trade that profit for more capital. As a result, capital accumulates infinitely, independent of the value produced by the labor which is provided to society. Artists require capital to convert their labor into value just as any other worker would, so where should that capital come from if not from control of the value they produce? Society must solve this problem or we will not have art to begin with. Only looking at the demand side obfuscates such issues that arise on the supply side, and the only reason we're talking about them now is that digital technology has solved the scarcity problem on the supply side. It has not solved the scarcity problem on the demand side, however. Finally, art, just like all technological progress, is always the product of entire societies and the history of all mankind that came before it. For this reason, all copyright and patents have no rational basis and are merely bandaids for the ill side effects of controlling capital to extract profit from labor to begin with.
palata 3y ago
So you don't like that large corporations can abuse current copyright laws, and your solution when they find a way to launder what they don't control yet (e.g. open source code) is to burn the copyright system to the ground, such that now they can also abuse what remains?

PartiallyTyped 3y ago

There is also the whole patent / copyright trolling issue too. The fact that $BIG_CORP can hire armies of lawyers to freeze competitors and beat them to market by filing frivolous lawsuits is yet another example of insanity in the whole system.

chongli 3y ago
I recently watched the documentary Fire in the Blood (2013) [1] about the use, by big pharma, of patents and WIPO to obstruct access to affordable antiretrovirals (ARVs) in Africa during the worst years of the AIDS epidemic, leading to over ten million deaths. All of this when the African market for these medications represented less than 1% of the total market, in dollars. It’s absolutely infuriating! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_in_the_Blood_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_in_the_Blood_(2013_film)
drdaeman 3y ago
It's a problem with legal system (not unique to any specific country, mind you, the problem is global), not patent or copyright system specifically. It grew incredible amounts of complexity so pro se became a sad joke in all but simplest cases, and there's no incentive to fix it - quite the opposite, everyone in the system is all for keeping the status quo, because it generates money.
- jrumbut 3y ago
  But there are specific problems with copyright and patent law that could be improved without a global systemic overhaul that may never happen. We have to take some small wins even in the presence of big problems.
  - drdaeman 3y ago
    Of course. I'm just saying that the core problem is larger than just the copyright and patent law.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  Personally I don’t think patents do what people believe they do (encourage innovation). It’s a bigger discussion but briefly, the only literal function of a patent is to discourage innovation by legally barring anyone from using a patented idea as part of a new innovation. The idea we have is that the secondary effects of this will be increased profits for inventors and therefore more innovation. But actually there’s loads of secondary effects and often many of them outweigh the effect of increased profit. For every one inventor that gets a patent there might be 100 prevented from using that idea in a different and innovative way. A classic example is 3D printers. Stratasys spent 15 years selling printers that cost tens of thousands of dollars. It wasn’t until the patent expired that people figured out how to make them for $250. Those cheaper printers are enabling mechanical engineers and designers to accelerate their process and make other new innovations faster. Stratasys had such a powerful patent they never bothered innovating down in price, instead rested on their laurels selling $25k printers to big customers. So how many inventions were delayed or shelved because the inventors couldn’t afford a $25,000 3D printer, and $250 printers didn’t exist yet? Both Stratasys and IBM held patents related to 3D printing and they had to cross license to go in to production, so how many others would have come up with 3D printing in the 1990’s if they had not been patented? Would first mover advantage in a free market have been enough to stimulate development of 3D printers? Could we have had $2000 3D printers in the early 2000’s (Stratasys sold theirs for $30k) instead of ten years later? How many engineers would have invented new gadgets faster if they had a 3D printer ten years earlier?

loudmax 3y ago

Fully agree that the existing copyright and intellectual property systems are dire need of deep reform. But to get people on board, you can't just propose burning it all down, you need to point to a viable alternative. Say, limiting copyrights to something sane like 15 or 30 years. Or making it easier to invalidate obvious or trivial patents. Or do you really want to do away with notions of intellectual property altogether? You can make an argument for that, but there would lead to deep economic changes, and you need to anticipate what the end result would look like. You still need some way to encourage the creation of new content. Pointing out that our copyright/IP system is broken is easy. And you're right, it's totally broken! Coming up with a fix is hard work.

TaylorAlexander 3y ago
I don’t think we need to use the legal system to encourage creation of new content! That’s a natural thing people do. In fact there’s a lot of artistic remixing that is illegal or ambiguously legal under the current copyright regime that can be a powerful form of expression. I really don’t think we need government policy to encourage artists to create art. (At least not of this sort - I am all for art grants.)
Zaskoda 3y ago
> But to get people on board, you can't just propose burning it all down, you need to point to a viable alternative. This may be true for most people, I don't know. However, I personally am fully on board the "burn it all down" train and have been for a while.
capr 3y ago
Pointing out that IP is broken is _not_ easy because most people believe in the contradictory notion of intellectual property, you included, not knowing the legal history of IP, the legal and economic history of the concept of property, and so on. If it were easy, it would be obvious to everybody that 1) IP law is immoral and 2) nothing bad would happen if it's abolished outright. Here's a free ebook on the subject, written by a patent lawyer no less: https://mises.org/library/against-intellectual-property-0 https://mises.org/library/against-intellectual-property-0

111111IIIIIII 3y ago

> I am firmly ready to burn this copyright system to the fucking ground. Same, but the issue is not copyright, which is simply an effort to wield the state to control intellectual property in the same way the state is wielded to control physical property. The compounding problem arises when property is capital, defined as the means to convert labor into new value. Capitalism is specifically a system in which one can wield control of capital (intellectual or otherwise) to extract profit from labor then trade that profit for more capital. As a result, capital accumulates infinitely, independent of the value produced by the labor which is provided to society. Artists require capital to convert their labor into value just as any other worker would, so where should that capital come from if not from control of the value they produce? Society must solve this problem or we will not have art to begin with. Only looking at the demand side obfuscates such issues that arise on the supply side, and the only reason we're talking about them now is that digital technology has solved the scarcity problem on the supply side. It has not solved the scarcity problem on the demand side, however. Finally, art, just like all technological progress, is always the product of entire societies and the history of all mankind that came before it. For this reason, all copyright and patents have no rational basis and are merely bandaids for the ill side effects of controlling capital to extract profit from labor to begin with.

palata 3y ago

So you don't like that large corporations can abuse current copyright laws, and your solution when they find a way to launder what they don't control yet (e.g. open source code) is to burn the copyright system to the ground, such that now they can also abuse what remains?