4 ms·

Imagine if, before intellectual property, you put 20 smart people in a room, and tell them to come up with solutions to add incentives for creative works. None

Imagine if, before intellectual property, you put 20 smart people in a room, and tell them to come up with solutions to add incentives for creative works. None of them would have come up with "Hey! Why don't we grant inventors monopolies over inventions! We could increase the ammount and quality of inventions by limiting what others can invent!". No one would ever think that's a good idea. It's completely backwards and counter intuitive. They would come up with things like y-combinator, angel funds, startup incubators. Or straight up government money investments. These are the obvious ideas that come up when you're trying to figure how to incentive ideas. You incentive ideas by investing in them, not by limiting them. And of course, as most people here probably already know, that's not how IP was invented. It was not a conclusion from trying to come up to a solution for investing in ideas. No sane human being would have thought that was a solution. IP was invented as a monarchy monopoly to give power to the king. The "but it's good for innovation" meme was an excuse invented later when they figured they could actually make a lot of money from it, so those who were profiting off monopolies had to find an excuse to keep it. It's so mind boggling to watch so many discussions where people ask "the ultimate hard question" of "but how else could be possibly incentive ideas without copyright???". C'mon, it's so straight-forward and we've been doing it for centuries. YC alone has done much more for promoting innovative creative works than copyright has done since it's invention. Do you really care about investing in ideas? Then put your money where your mouth is, become an angel investor, and stop pretending it's a hard problem to solve.

manaskarekar 14y ago
"The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying." -- John Carmack. http://web.archive.org/web/20010124060000/www.voodooextreme.com/games/interviews/carmack/ http://web.archive.org/web/20010124060000/www.voodooextreme....
- petegrif 14y ago
  I may be horrifying but rediscovering something is not the same as inventing it.
  - doug363 14y ago
    Why do you say they're not the same? I would tend to think that they are essentially the same.
- stevewilhelm 14y ago
  Or when presented with a problem, one could do a patent search, license the existing technology, and build something even more innovative.
  - chii 14y ago
    this will work if the tech is sufficiently innovative, and is difficult to implement, and is not at all obvious that such piece of tech is the solution to such a problem. However, some of the patents i've seen being battled out in court is about the _shape_ of a phone. Rounded corners. Swipe, pinch to zoom, and bounce when reached the end of a list. These things are not worthy of being patented, and none of them are non-obvious enough to be called innovative. it is at these patents that ruin the system.
rayiner 14y ago
Copyright isn't about incentivizing innovation. It's about preventing free-riding. You think any sensible VC would have invested in Microsoft if there was nothing preventing Tandy, etc, from buying a single IBM machine, copying the OS off the disks, and selling as many machines with Windows loaded as they wanted without paying any licensing fees to Microsoft? As for YC, etc... What a ridiculous bit of self-important exaggeration. Scribd, AirBnB, Discus... Oh my god all the innovation! More innovation than has ever been made possible by the patent laws or the copyright laws over the course of history! Seriously, I think YC, etc, is great, but let's not forget that there is a whole world of technology out there, and internet startups are one small niche. In most technology fields, all the money YC has ever handed out would barely make a dent in the capital requirements of bringing a product even to the prototype stage. Also, let's not rewrite history here. Intellectual proponents of copyright and patent law include people like Thomas Jefferson, who none would accuse of being a monarchist.
- AnthonyMouse 14y ago
  >Copyright isn't about incentivizing innovation. It's about preventing free-riding. Why is free-riding bad unless it reduces the incentive for innovation? If half the world can free-ride on something with no marginal cost that will be produced regardless of the free-riding, the result is greater economic efficiency. >You think any sensible VC would have invested in Microsoft if there was nothing preventing Tandy, etc, from buying a single IBM machine, copying the OS off the disks, and selling as many machines with Windows loaded as they wanted without paying any licensing fees to Microsoft? I don't think anyone is suggesting that Microsoft would be able to survive with the same business model in the absence of copyright. But the real question is, would there still be operating systems? And obviously there would be -- at the very least BSD and GNU/Linux and the like. >Also, let's not rewrite history here. Intellectual proponents of copyright and patent law include people like Thomas Jefferson, who none would accuse of being a monarchist. The text below was written by Thomas Jefferson -- it isn't exactly a ringing endorsement: If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.
stevewilhelm 14y ago
The article was about copyright which protects original works of authorship, not patents which protect inventions. Every investor asks how defensible is your company. For certain products: drugs, microprocessors, and countless other capital intensive products patents protection is one of the important mechanisms for defending marketshare. For example, it takes tens of millions of dollars to design a new drug and get it through trails. If competitors could just copy it as soon as it was released, the company that did the original work could not recoup its R&D costs and would eventually go broke. Without patent protection, no one would invest in companies that designed new drugs and innovation would stagnate. Copyright provides a defense mechanism for creative companies like Disney. Again, it takes tens (to hundreds) of millions of dollars to develop a movie. If anyone could just copy it and sell it, Disney would could not recoup its production costs. No one would buy Disney stock. Creative expression would stagnate. Are there problems with the current patent and copyright laws? Yes. But the fundamental protections they were intended to provide are still necessary for innovation and creation to flourish in a market economy.
alexqgb 14y ago
You know what else is "counter-intuative"? The heliocentric world view. Also, relativity. Imagine, if before Einstein, you put 20 smart people in a room and tell them to come up with ideas about mass and energy. None of them would...well, you get the idea. Look, I'm not saying that copyright is all that. I'm just saying that if you want to argue against it, you need to find a basis MUCH more intelligent than the one you've selected, because if there's one thing that science has demonstrated about the world, it's that the intuitive thing is often wrong, and sometimes spectacularly so.

manaskarekar 14y ago

"The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying." -- John Carmack. http://web.archive.org/web/20010124060000/www.voodooextreme.com/games/interviews/carmack/ http://web.archive.org/web/20010124060000/www.voodooextreme....

petegrif 14y ago
I may be horrifying but rediscovering something is not the same as inventing it.
- doug363 14y ago
  Why do you say they're not the same? I would tend to think that they are essentially the same.
stevewilhelm 14y ago
Or when presented with a problem, one could do a patent search, license the existing technology, and build something even more innovative.
- chii 14y ago
  this will work if the tech is sufficiently innovative, and is difficult to implement, and is not at all obvious that such piece of tech is the solution to such a problem. However, some of the patents i've seen being battled out in court is about the _shape_ of a phone. Rounded corners. Swipe, pinch to zoom, and bounce when reached the end of a list. These things are not worthy of being patented, and none of them are non-obvious enough to be called innovative. it is at these patents that ruin the system.

rayiner 14y ago

Copyright isn't about incentivizing innovation. It's about preventing free-riding. You think any sensible VC would have invested in Microsoft if there was nothing preventing Tandy, etc, from buying a single IBM machine, copying the OS off the disks, and selling as many machines with Windows loaded as they wanted without paying any licensing fees to Microsoft? As for YC, etc... What a ridiculous bit of self-important exaggeration. Scribd, AirBnB, Discus... Oh my god all the innovation! More innovation than has ever been made possible by the patent laws or the copyright laws over the course of history! Seriously, I think YC, etc, is great, but let's not forget that there is a whole world of technology out there, and internet startups are one small niche. In most technology fields, all the money YC has ever handed out would barely make a dent in the capital requirements of bringing a product even to the prototype stage. Also, let's not rewrite history here. Intellectual proponents of copyright and patent law include people like Thomas Jefferson, who none would accuse of being a monarchist.

AnthonyMouse 14y ago
>Copyright isn't about incentivizing innovation. It's about preventing free-riding. Why is free-riding bad unless it reduces the incentive for innovation? If half the world can free-ride on something with no marginal cost that will be produced regardless of the free-riding, the result is greater economic efficiency. >You think any sensible VC would have invested in Microsoft if there was nothing preventing Tandy, etc, from buying a single IBM machine, copying the OS off the disks, and selling as many machines with Windows loaded as they wanted without paying any licensing fees to Microsoft? I don't think anyone is suggesting that Microsoft would be able to survive with the same business model in the absence of copyright. But the real question is, would there still be operating systems? And obviously there would be -- at the very least BSD and GNU/Linux and the like. >Also, let's not rewrite history here. Intellectual proponents of copyright and patent law include people like Thomas Jefferson, who none would accuse of being a monarchist. The text below was written by Thomas Jefferson -- it isn't exactly a ringing endorsement: If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.

stevewilhelm 14y ago

The article was about copyright which protects original works of authorship, not patents which protect inventions. Every investor asks how defensible is your company. For certain products: drugs, microprocessors, and countless other capital intensive products patents protection is one of the important mechanisms for defending marketshare. For example, it takes tens of millions of dollars to design a new drug and get it through trails. If competitors could just copy it as soon as it was released, the company that did the original work could not recoup its R&D costs and would eventually go broke. Without patent protection, no one would invest in companies that designed new drugs and innovation would stagnate. Copyright provides a defense mechanism for creative companies like Disney. Again, it takes tens (to hundreds) of millions of dollars to develop a movie. If anyone could just copy it and sell it, Disney would could not recoup its production costs. No one would buy Disney stock. Creative expression would stagnate. Are there problems with the current patent and copyright laws? Yes. But the fundamental protections they were intended to provide are still necessary for innovation and creation to flourish in a market economy.

alexqgb 14y ago

You know what else is "counter-intuative"? The heliocentric world view. Also, relativity. Imagine, if before Einstein, you put 20 smart people in a room and tell them to come up with ideas about mass and energy. None of them would...well, you get the idea. Look, I'm not saying that copyright is all that. I'm just saying that if you want to argue against it, you need to find a basis MUCH more intelligent than the one you've selected, because if there's one thing that science has demonstrated about the world, it's that the intuitive thing is often wrong, and sometimes spectacularly so.