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Patent, trademark, copyright, etc are all supposed to benefit society as a whole. The point isn't that corporations get to lock things away forever. The goal is
by jmward01 2y ago
Patent, trademark, copyright, etc are all supposed to benefit society as a whole. The point isn't that corporations get to lock things away forever. The goal is to incentivize innovation, both technological and cultural. The more companies make the argument that 'thing x from a long time ago is crucial to us now' the more I think that our current IP laws are actually slowing down innovation instead of incentivizing it. Maybe we need a new system that starts costing money after a point to maintain IP rights. That system would recognize the value taken by private companies holding on to old IP to the detriment of society and force them to come up with new things to justify their existence instead of living off of that one thing they did right 100 years ago.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y agoIp rights should just end after a relatively quick slice of time. You made your money off it, now it’s time to pass it on to the public. A payment model just ensures the only entities who can hold ip long term are corporations.
- jeffreyrogers 2y agoThat's how it was originally but over time the terms have been extended (largely due to advocacy from organizations that own large catalogs of copyrighted material). It's now tied to the life of the creator rather than the time since creation or publication.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y agoYep. It needs to be restored or even shortened beyond the original window.
- RajT88 2y agoIIRC, early copyright (say, during Mozart's time) required royalties to only be paid out for the first performance of a work. And that is why some of these composers were so prolific - to keep up their payday, they had to crank out music instead of collecting on royalties of performances they were directly involved with. Unthinkable today, really.
- theptip 2y agoThis is the simple solution. 10 years seems fine to me, 20 years at a stretch. The current regime is a clear case of regulatory capture.
- mmcgaha 2y agoSo musicians should not be compensated when their old songs play on the radio? You made your money in 1974 now move along while my company exploits your work for free.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y agoNope, guess not
- cess11 2y agoWhy do you think that? Can you point to some early philosopher of law that made such utilitarian arguments?
- throwaway48476 2y agohttps://www.copyright.gov/timeline/ https://www.copyright.gov/timeline/
- mrighele 2y agoFor Americans, the utilitarian argument is made in the Constitution: _"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises [...] to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"_ [1] [1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/ https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/
- cess11 2y agoDoesn't say anything about "benefit society as a whole".
- anigbrowl 2y agoBecause that's the stated purpose of patents in the US constitution.
- jmward01 2y agoThe actual text of the US constitution maybe? Article I Section 8 Enumerated Powers Clause 8 Intellectual Property To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; Seems like the idea is to promote innovation by making sure it is for a limited time only seems pretty ingrained in the idea.
- tmtvl 2y agoIf it says 'for a limited time', then wouldn't tying itmto the lifetime of the author be unconstitutional? Because strictly speaking it's impossible to predict whether an author's life will end.
- pinkmuffinere 2y agoI see this sentiment frequently, but I think it is missing some of the crucial details: - patents last for 20 years in the us - trademarks do not have value to the rest of the world. Eg, the name “Kleenex” is (was?) a granted trademark, to help customers identify products from that specific company. “Kleenex” has somewhat become generic, but I don’t think this is really better or worse for humanity in general — it just removes some branding strength from Kleenex. - copyright lasts life of author +70 years. This is problematic imo. I think the concern about copyright is justified, but I think the others are honestly pretty decent. But of course different people will have different opinions.
- paxys 2y agoThe big problem is that none of these laws have been updated to deal with digital property. We simply get new interpretations based on the whims of random judges who may not even be familiar with how the technology works. Software patents are the perfect example of this. Digital piracy/lending is another. And let's not even get into AI/LLMs.
- SequoiaHope 2y ago20 years is an eternity in terms of innovation. This has an extreme effect compared to the natural state (no IP restrictions). I argue that the effects of patents is actually poorly understood, and most arguments for how they work fail to explain how and why open source works, revealing serious flaws in the foundational theories of IP restrictions. The sole function of a patent is to restrict innovation. That’s the only direct result of patents. All other claims about encouraging innovation rely on beliefs about secondary and tertiary effects which I believe are incomplete, out of date, and often simply incorrect. Edit: Even the pure capitalists don’t like it: https://youtu.be/hoSWC_6mDCk https://youtu.be/hoSWC_6mDCk
- bobthepanda 2y agotrademark is also supposed to protect against misleading copies of reputable goods. it's hard to say how enforcing against counterfeiting would work without something that looked like trademark law.
- 2y ago
- 1oooqooq 2y agohalf of your sp500-based-retirement is munching off ancient standards patents in media/tech/health. the rest is split between selling you disposable devices and sugar water. ... so in a way it does benefit society. but it's the society that likes to steal from social security and then call it a scam.
- kiba 2y agoAssumption 1: Commercialization and incentivization(beyond what is already achievable in our market system) of the production of media goods are a good thing and we would be poorer culturally-wise. Assumption 2: Without IP laws, people would not produce works(aside from credits and attribution). Engineers will stop engineering. Lawyers will stop writing opinions. Scientists won't write research papers. Assumption 3: IP laws did work to incentivize production and technological advancement, and they are only or the primary means to do so. We just need to reign in the excess. Assumption 4: People who created useful works for its own sake are not valuable(open source software/hardware, inventors inventing things and freely publishing information, etc). Patents and copyright laws should favors the people who use copyright and patents over them, and the profit motive should reign supreme.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y agoIs this meant to be a rewording of the parent comment as a critique, or is it meant to be an expression of your views? I’d probably contest assumptions 3 and 4, but I’m not sure if you yourself even support them.
- kiba 2y agoHow about both? You are welcome to critique my opinion. As for assumption 3, there's SpaceX. They don't open their design of their rockets to the public where their competitors, such as the Chinese can copy them. Neither the US government nor SpaceX wants that. So there's a large amount of innovations, probably countless designs that went into these rockets. Maybe in a better geopolitical situation, patents would be respected, but why would SpaceX gives everyone the blueprint to catch up? Patents make more sense if designs are easily reverse engineered and you still want a monopoly to make back your investment. That is clearly false as people have made innovation in 3D printing where new designs are standardized for the benefit of the whole market. Assumption 4 is the defacto state of things even if it were not the intention. People who invent useful things for the sake of useful things are clearly at a disadvantage against corporations or entities who have more money to hire lawyers. There's already at least one case of a trivial patent for 3D printing stronger layers that expired being repatented again by another company, increasing legal uncertainty from implementing the technique in slicers and other software. Most slicer these days are open source, generally don't make money for its developers(at least not directly), but they do grow the 3D printing market through its active development. The slicers also happen to share code, unsurprising given that they are forks of one another. Clearly, this model is incompatible with the patent system as it stands.
- nine_k 2y ago(Repeating for n-th time:) I like the idea of exponential cost of IP protection. First 10 or so years the protection is free. Then, on the first year of paid protection, you pay $10. On the second, $20. On the tenth, $10,240. On the sixteenth, $655,360. The year you miss a payment the protection ceases. If your IP is immensely valuable and is bringing you gobs of money, you can continue paying and keep your monopoly. But the case of keeping reams of stuff under the lock "just in case" would be largely eliminated. Anything that's not a cash cow currently being milked and paid for would get released to the public domain. On top of that, the federal budget would receive some extra money, but only from those who is making money, and not the small guy who just has published an indie game on Steam.
- pixelpoet 2y agoThat sounds like a really good idea, one problem though: this doesn't benefit the lawmaking and law-exploiting classes, so why would it happen? It's pretty clear that the legal system mostly exists to preserve big financial interests. I spent much of my adult life watching SCO play the system...
- bluGill 2y agoVoters need to make it clear that it does benefit the lawmaking class. Votes are more powerful than money in politics - but only if you use them. If you fall for one party is all good you have lost power. The hard part is getting enough other voters to care. If it is just you money is more important. If it is you and many others though you beat money.
- AlienRobot 2y agoWhom would you side with? People whose livelihoods and retirement depend on their copyright. Or people who want to play old video-games for free.
- wizzwizz4 2y agoShow me an actual person whose livelihood or retirement depends on their copyright (and not, say, owning somebody else's copyright). I'm not convinced that the current state of copyright law actually benefits authors and artists.
- gorgoiler 2y agoIn a free market of ideas, copyright would have perished long ago. As a teenager of the 90s I have, correctly or incorrectly, been indoctrinated with the notion that RIAA/MPAA have too much clout for their own good. Sweden (Pirate Bay) and New Zealand (Kim.Com) taught us that. But it’s not just The US — the bulk of my record collection is still digitised as Ogg/Vorbis in protest of Fraunhofer’s hold on MP3 as a non-public format. Was I brainwashed? Did the kids of yesteryear lose in the long run? Aside from nostalgia, it’s worth remembering the history of this battle to learn for the future.
- ghssds 2y agoI like that your solution to corporations locking things away forever is a new system that would immediately excludes individual citizens and ties the capability to remove a cultural good from the public to wealth. The main problems with current copyright laws, I think, is the creators need to sell their right to one of a handful of powerful corporations to make money at all, then those corporations grip on their rights and monopolize it, even if it means something isn't available at all. A better idea would be author's rights that can't be sold, and licensing that can't be denied. That way there still is monetary incentives to create, but cultural goods remain available to the public.