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IP is just too strong. The terms are ridiculously long (especially for copyright), there are multiple workarounds for "fair use", such as DMCA, and patents on s

IP is just too strong. The terms are ridiculously long (especially for copyright), there are multiple workarounds for "fair use", such as DMCA, and patents on simple concepts like linked lists are not laughed out of the room. All of this stuff needs to be weakened (and shortened). Part of the reason Chinese companies are able to iterate quickly on technology like 3d printers or drones is that it's possible to simply ignore this stifling IP regime until you actually need to start selling internationally. It's telling that the article specifically calls out patents originating in China. It seems ridiculous to treat these as serious filings and not shredder fodder when the originating country happily allows their local industry to ignore western patents. The asymmetry here leads to obvious advantages for Chinese companies.

izacus 1y ago
The more I look into it, the more I'm convinced that current state of IP law is the rot at the core of western worlds technological stagnation. The rise of monopolistic megacorps, lack of independent innovation and enshittifcation can pretty much be traced back to the wide free market violating reach of current IP law. This article just highlights it and shows how China weaponized this weakness of the west and is successfuly using it to pull ahead. Meanwhile our own innovative companies and individuals get ground into dust by the boot of patent lawyers wielded by megacorps.
- simpaticoder 1y ago
  >Meanwhile our own innvative companies and individuals get ground into dust by the boot of patent lawyers wielded by megacorps. So they sell a large part of their company to capital who can afford to acquire and defend IP. In this happy case they are only ground into 90% dust.
- jandrese 1y ago
  It's telling that before the Patent system the solution was secretive guilds that jealously (sometimes lethally) guarded their secrets to avoid competition. This was obviously terrible since it greatly slowed down innovation. I'm not sure what the correct solution is to this problem. We want to avoid anything that causes a return of the guild system, but at the same time we don't want small inventors steamrolled by large corporations. That said, I think corporations should be much more limited in their Patent powers. In fact it's questionable how much value society gets out of large corporation patents. If another large corporation "steals" the idea and capitalizes on it first that is their own fault. The only people who profit are the lawyers.
  - tmcdos 1y ago
    And what is wrong with competition? If someone else makes a product or service better than you - why should you get the benefits and not him/her? The correct solution is to freely share all knowledge (IP). Open source is not perfect but it is a step in the right direction. P2P and torrents is another step in the right direction.
  - cactacea 1y ago
    > it's questionable how much value society gets out of large corporations ftfy It ain't just patents
  - dec0dedab0de 1y ago
    I think relying on trade secrets for many things would actually be an improvement over what we have now. You could still keep your recipe secret, but someone else could come up with something similar with no risk.
    - thayne 1y ago
      Not to mention that patents are so (intentionally) difficult to understand that even patented technology is basically trade secrets now anyway. And the useful designs are protected by NDAs.
      - jandrese 1y ago
        You can't put a NDA on a Patent. NDAs are basically the modern version of guilds. Imagine a world where absolutely everything about your job is kept under a strict NDA. This is true of startups, but it doesn't scale, especially once you start actually selling product and need to make customers happy to get the sale.
        thayne 1y ago
        > You can't put a NDA on a Patent. On the patent itself, no. But on design docs, CAD files, source code, circuit diagrams, etc. you can, and it is common practice to require NDAs for anyone who has access to them. And in some cases copyright law is also used to protect them. > Imagine a world where absolutely everything about your job is kept under a strict NDA. This is true of startups, but it doesn't scale, especially once you start actually selling product and need to make customers happy to get the sale. This is already a reality at many companies, including large ones.
- kristofferR 1y ago
  Yeah, people complain about AI companies "stealing" IP, but it's becoming accepted, both by judges and the US president [1]. I'm not sure weakening of IP law is such a bad thing after all. Let's just hope the weakening trickles down from AI juggernauts to smaller fish. [1] https://torrentfreak.com/president-trump-its-not-doable-for-ai-companies-to-pay-for-all-copyrighted-input/ https://torrentfreak.com/president-trump-its-not-doable-for-...
- BrenBarn 1y ago
  It's a factor, but I also wonder whether the key morpheme there isn't the "mega" in "megacorps". If, say, entity A attempting to enforce IP against entity B had to pay fees proportional to the size ratio (e.g., Megacorp enforcing against Little Joe's Software requires a $1 billion fee from Megacorp), things would be different. The problem there is identifying the relevant entity, and I think that is the key. And it's not just a problem with IP, it's a problem with all property: it's just too easy for "real" beneficial ownership to be hidden so that penalties and enforcement can be accurately targeted at big market players. A few well-targeted such actions could loosen things up a lot.
  - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
    Just ignore the size of the plaintiff and make everything depend on the size of the defendant. Is the defendant a huge megacorp? Make every inference against them. Is it a tiny small business? Give them every benefit of the doubt. Then if megacorp tries to set up a tiny shell company to do their dirty work, you just ignore the shell company and sue the megacorp. Whereas if something is actually a small business, there is no megacorp hiding anywhere behind it.
    - BrenBarn 1y ago
      That's an interesting idea, but I don't want to let small operators run roughshod over other small operators.
      - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
        How do you propose it could ever be otherwise? Under this system it's hard to sue small entities, but under any system it's generally useless to sue small entities except as a harassment mechanism because they don't have any money to pay damages anyway.
- Xelbair 1y ago
  If IP laws and patent laws were created to protect right holders from abuse of bigger players on the market, and they are used to actually entrech those players... They need a drastic reform.
martin-t 1y ago
It's not a binary too string / too weak. It's that _copyright_: - protects the wrong entities (corporations instead of individuals who did the real work) - IP should be collectively owned by the people who created it and selling it should be illegal, - is too long, yes - DMCA can be used to harass without actually owning the IP and there are no penalties - the fair use exception can be used to allow clear cases of plagiarism where you mechanically transform an original work with barely any human input in such a way that it's hard or impossible to prove it was based on the original. As for _patents_, they should simply require proof of work - basically they should only be for recovering research costs (with profit), not holding everyone hostage. They should also be subject to experts in the field verifying they are not trivial and how much work they would take to replicate. And obviously China is a global parasite. We should apply to them the same standards they apply to us - none. --- More generally incentives matter. If trying something has (near) 0 cost but high reward, abusive actors will keep trying despite most of their attempts failing. Anybody who understands that incentives shape the world will immediately identify this pattern (any gamedevs here?). There must be punishments for provably bogus attempts to use IP - both copyright and patents.
- pixl97 1y ago
  >And obviously China is a global parasite. Britain said the same things about the US in the early days. We told them to f* off about copyright/patent stuff quite often.
  - WillAdams 1y ago
    Britain was also putting into place laws/regulations/policies requiring that the U.S. purchase from British manufacturers rather than developing native production --- there's a reason why the first printing press in North America was in Mexico.
    - izacus 1y ago
      Which is pretty much what patent law ends up being right? The patent holder telling the licensee the conditions.
andrewmcwatters 1y ago
To be fair, in the States, you can own a small business, come up with a good idea, and someone can just copy it and compete against you regardless if it's copyright infringement or not. And that's in the context of a domestic legal issue. You have to be able to defend your intellectual property, and that's expensive, which is the parent comment's point. I mean, imagine you, AlexandrB, come up with some good idea, start working on the implementation and delivery of that good or service, and someone just... copies it. Or copies it and releases it for free. Should... we just not care about that? Because the idea of not having any intellectual property protections whatsoever is even more absurd than having them. It requires incredible, statistically insurmountable effort, attention, and revenue to create even a two-person, full-time, sustainable business. More so in software and hardware where everyone is releasing open source software, everyone wants everything to be free, no one wants to pay for anything, and hardware designs are regularly stolen. Forget that dude, you can make more money selling lemonade in your neighborhood. A kid selling candy bars for school fundraisers has a better chance than someone creating a product in our field and taking it to market. No, we definitely need intellectual property protection and it should be essentially free to defend yourself as an individual or small business.
- mlyle 1y ago
  The deal is supposed to be that there's a trade: * You are given an exclusive right to exploit a work, for enough time to make it worth your while. * Everyone gets the work in the end. We're not succeeding at this. The terms are a little too short for biotech. They're wayyyyy too long for software. The barriers to entry to get and enforce IP are too large for small businesses. But it's also too easy to figure it all out and generate tons of fake IPR to harass real business with.
- michaelmrose 1y ago
  People who aren't rich already don't have any intellectual property anyway. The idea of nobody having them seems inherently more suitable insofar as someone could as it stands just ignore your property anyway with the primary difference in this hypothetical reality that instead of being able to copy you AND shut you down they just copy you.
intended 1y ago
IP is always strong, because information does not behave like other goods. There are no “degrees” either you have protection and enforce it, or you dont. It seems we tend to struggle with most things that obey power laws (wealth, attention, trust) in our economies and societies.
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago
  > There are no “degrees” either you have protection and enforce it, or you dont. It's quite possible to have a narrow IP right. Copyright is a good example. The existence of a copyright on Windows doesn't stop anybody from creating Linux. The problem isn't the copyright itself, it's the likes of DMCA 1201 which allows the copyright on one thing to be leveraged into control over other things, e.g. by restricting adversarial interoperability. Which then gets leveraged into control over things with a network effect, and that's where all the problems come from. An exclusive right should never apply to a network effect. Likewise, they issue patents not just on ingenious inventions but on abstract gibberish that amounts to a claim on the problem to be solved rather than any particular solution, which they simply ought not to do. Let there be patents on engines and batteries (concrete things) but not software (an abstraction that exists only as information processing).

izacus 1y ago

The more I look into it, the more I'm convinced that current state of IP law is the rot at the core of western worlds technological stagnation. The rise of monopolistic megacorps, lack of independent innovation and enshittifcation can pretty much be traced back to the wide free market violating reach of current IP law. This article just highlights it and shows how China weaponized this weakness of the west and is successfuly using it to pull ahead. Meanwhile our own innovative companies and individuals get ground into dust by the boot of patent lawyers wielded by megacorps.

simpaticoder 1y ago
>Meanwhile our own innvative companies and individuals get ground into dust by the boot of patent lawyers wielded by megacorps. So they sell a large part of their company to capital who can afford to acquire and defend IP. In this happy case they are only ground into 90% dust.
jandrese 1y ago
It's telling that before the Patent system the solution was secretive guilds that jealously (sometimes lethally) guarded their secrets to avoid competition. This was obviously terrible since it greatly slowed down innovation. I'm not sure what the correct solution is to this problem. We want to avoid anything that causes a return of the guild system, but at the same time we don't want small inventors steamrolled by large corporations. That said, I think corporations should be much more limited in their Patent powers. In fact it's questionable how much value society gets out of large corporation patents. If another large corporation "steals" the idea and capitalizes on it first that is their own fault. The only people who profit are the lawyers.
- tmcdos 1y ago
  And what is wrong with competition? If someone else makes a product or service better than you - why should you get the benefits and not him/her? The correct solution is to freely share all knowledge (IP). Open source is not perfect but it is a step in the right direction. P2P and torrents is another step in the right direction.
- cactacea 1y ago
  > it's questionable how much value society gets out of large corporations ftfy It ain't just patents
- dec0dedab0de 1y ago
  I think relying on trade secrets for many things would actually be an improvement over what we have now. You could still keep your recipe secret, but someone else could come up with something similar with no risk.
  - thayne 1y ago
    Not to mention that patents are so (intentionally) difficult to understand that even patented technology is basically trade secrets now anyway. And the useful designs are protected by NDAs.
    - jandrese 1y ago
      You can't put a NDA on a Patent. NDAs are basically the modern version of guilds. Imagine a world where absolutely everything about your job is kept under a strict NDA. This is true of startups, but it doesn't scale, especially once you start actually selling product and need to make customers happy to get the sale.
      - thayne 1y ago
        > You can't put a NDA on a Patent. On the patent itself, no. But on design docs, CAD files, source code, circuit diagrams, etc. you can, and it is common practice to require NDAs for anyone who has access to them. And in some cases copyright law is also used to protect them. > Imagine a world where absolutely everything about your job is kept under a strict NDA. This is true of startups, but it doesn't scale, especially once you start actually selling product and need to make customers happy to get the sale. This is already a reality at many companies, including large ones.
kristofferR 1y ago
Yeah, people complain about AI companies "stealing" IP, but it's becoming accepted, both by judges and the US president [1]. I'm not sure weakening of IP law is such a bad thing after all. Let's just hope the weakening trickles down from AI juggernauts to smaller fish. [1] https://torrentfreak.com/president-trump-its-not-doable-for-ai-companies-to-pay-for-all-copyrighted-input/ https://torrentfreak.com/president-trump-its-not-doable-for-...
BrenBarn 1y ago
It's a factor, but I also wonder whether the key morpheme there isn't the "mega" in "megacorps". If, say, entity A attempting to enforce IP against entity B had to pay fees proportional to the size ratio (e.g., Megacorp enforcing against Little Joe's Software requires a $1 billion fee from Megacorp), things would be different. The problem there is identifying the relevant entity, and I think that is the key. And it's not just a problem with IP, it's a problem with all property: it's just too easy for "real" beneficial ownership to be hidden so that penalties and enforcement can be accurately targeted at big market players. A few well-targeted such actions could loosen things up a lot.
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago
  Just ignore the size of the plaintiff and make everything depend on the size of the defendant. Is the defendant a huge megacorp? Make every inference against them. Is it a tiny small business? Give them every benefit of the doubt. Then if megacorp tries to set up a tiny shell company to do their dirty work, you just ignore the shell company and sue the megacorp. Whereas if something is actually a small business, there is no megacorp hiding anywhere behind it.
  - BrenBarn 1y ago
    That's an interesting idea, but I don't want to let small operators run roughshod over other small operators.
    - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      How do you propose it could ever be otherwise? Under this system it's hard to sue small entities, but under any system it's generally useless to sue small entities except as a harassment mechanism because they don't have any money to pay damages anyway.
Xelbair 1y ago
If IP laws and patent laws were created to protect right holders from abuse of bigger players on the market, and they are used to actually entrech those players... They need a drastic reform.

martin-t 1y ago

It's not a binary too string / too weak. It's that _copyright_: - protects the wrong entities (corporations instead of individuals who did the real work) - IP should be collectively owned by the people who created it and selling it should be illegal, - is too long, yes - DMCA can be used to harass without actually owning the IP and there are no penalties - the fair use exception can be used to allow clear cases of plagiarism where you mechanically transform an original work with barely any human input in such a way that it's hard or impossible to prove it was based on the original. As for _patents_, they should simply require proof of work - basically they should only be for recovering research costs (with profit), not holding everyone hostage. They should also be subject to experts in the field verifying they are not trivial and how much work they would take to replicate. And obviously China is a global parasite. We should apply to them the same standards they apply to us - none. --- More generally incentives matter. If trying something has (near) 0 cost but high reward, abusive actors will keep trying despite most of their attempts failing. Anybody who understands that incentives shape the world will immediately identify this pattern (any gamedevs here?). There must be punishments for provably bogus attempts to use IP - both copyright and patents.

pixl97 1y ago
>And obviously China is a global parasite. Britain said the same things about the US in the early days. We told them to f* off about copyright/patent stuff quite often.
- WillAdams 1y ago
  Britain was also putting into place laws/regulations/policies requiring that the U.S. purchase from British manufacturers rather than developing native production --- there's a reason why the first printing press in North America was in Mexico.
  - izacus 1y ago
    Which is pretty much what patent law ends up being right? The patent holder telling the licensee the conditions.

andrewmcwatters 1y ago

To be fair, in the States, you can own a small business, come up with a good idea, and someone can just copy it and compete against you regardless if it's copyright infringement or not. And that's in the context of a domestic legal issue. You have to be able to defend your intellectual property, and that's expensive, which is the parent comment's point. I mean, imagine you, AlexandrB, come up with some good idea, start working on the implementation and delivery of that good or service, and someone just... copies it. Or copies it and releases it for free. Should... we just not care about that? Because the idea of not having any intellectual property protections whatsoever is even more absurd than having them. It requires incredible, statistically insurmountable effort, attention, and revenue to create even a two-person, full-time, sustainable business. More so in software and hardware where everyone is releasing open source software, everyone wants everything to be free, no one wants to pay for anything, and hardware designs are regularly stolen. Forget that dude, you can make more money selling lemonade in your neighborhood. A kid selling candy bars for school fundraisers has a better chance than someone creating a product in our field and taking it to market. No, we definitely need intellectual property protection and it should be essentially free to defend yourself as an individual or small business.

mlyle 1y ago
The deal is supposed to be that there's a trade: * You are given an exclusive right to exploit a work, for enough time to make it worth your while. * Everyone gets the work in the end. We're not succeeding at this. The terms are a little too short for biotech. They're wayyyyy too long for software. The barriers to entry to get and enforce IP are too large for small businesses. But it's also too easy to figure it all out and generate tons of fake IPR to harass real business with.
michaelmrose 1y ago
People who aren't rich already don't have any intellectual property anyway. The idea of nobody having them seems inherently more suitable insofar as someone could as it stands just ignore your property anyway with the primary difference in this hypothetical reality that instead of being able to copy you AND shut you down they just copy you.

intended 1y ago

IP is always strong, because information does not behave like other goods. There are no “degrees” either you have protection and enforce it, or you dont. It seems we tend to struggle with most things that obey power laws (wealth, attention, trust) in our economies and societies.

AnthonyMouse 1y ago
> There are no “degrees” either you have protection and enforce it, or you dont. It's quite possible to have a narrow IP right. Copyright is a good example. The existence of a copyright on Windows doesn't stop anybody from creating Linux. The problem isn't the copyright itself, it's the likes of DMCA 1201 which allows the copyright on one thing to be leveraged into control over other things, e.g. by restricting adversarial interoperability. Which then gets leveraged into control over things with a network effect, and that's where all the problems come from. An exclusive right should never apply to a network effect. Likewise, they issue patents not just on ingenious inventions but on abstract gibberish that amounts to a claim on the problem to be solved rather than any particular solution, which they simply ought not to do. Let there be patents on engines and batteries (concrete things) but not software (an abstraction that exists only as information processing).