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by erelong 6mo ago
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- randomNumber7 6mo agoIt's even more absurd now when the big AI companies train their LLMs on torrented books.
- giwook 6mo agoDon't you know that it's okay to steal IP (and skirt laws in general) when you're a big company with lots of money?
- wiseowise 6mo agoOne torrent is a crime, breaking all the laws by downloading terabytes of books and processing them is a trillion dollar business.
- protocolture 6mo agoThe torrenting was the only thing they were found to have done wrong, which makes sense.
- layer8 6mo agoDon’t you mean as a law? Ideas should be free.
- bjourne 6mo agoNo as a concept. Assigning ownership to specific bit patterns is absurd.
- kube-system 6mo agoSo, anyone should be able to sell something called "Coca Cola"?
- senko 6mo agoNitpick: that’s trademark, not copyright. While it’s bundled under IP, it’s a different beast altogether.
- kube-system 6mo agoThe above claim was in fact regarding “intellectual property”. If you break it down, there are plenty of IP rights which make a lot of sense. Here’s one for copyright: “Do you think any corporation should be allowed to make closed source forks of GPL software?”
- senko 6mo agoIf there’s no copyright, there’s no closed source. You get their code, decompile/disassemble and reuse as you see fit. You might argue that doesn't help much if they never distribute that code (only runs on their servers). Here’s the inconvenient truth: GPL already allows that. Anyone can take a GPL codebase, do any modifications they want, run it forever, and never contribute back. You’d need AGPL to forbid that. GPL is only concerned if you further distribute the modifications. Next one?
- lamonade 6mo agoHere’s the convenient truth: GPL doesnt allow distributing the binary without distributing the code. Next one?
- senko 6mo agoAwesome. If you think that is stopping anyone, here's a challenge for you: GNU Bash is GPL. You can run Bash (and many other Linux commands) in Windows through Windows Subsystem for Linux. In fact, WSL is a nice example of Microsoft doing embrace & extend. The challenge: find the Microsoft's published code for Bash.
- 6mo ago
- layer8 6mo agoIntellectual property isn’t about bit patterns.
- jjice 6mo agoLike, all together? I'd agree that copyright terms are often much too long, but if you write a book, I'm totally okay with you owning the rights to that and making money off of it for a while.
- PunchyHamster 6mo agoWe need to split "a creation" and "a set of ideas used in creation" You created entire book ? Sell it for 40 years, sure But that should not apply to someone taking a tiny thing from it and making their own stuff around it, 10 years maybe.
- jjice 6mo ago> But that should not apply to someone taking a tiny thing from it and making their own stuff around it, 10 years maybe Totally agree with that idea.
- protocolture 6mo agoYes all together.
- JellyBeanThief 6mo agoThis sounds flippant, but I agree with it, so I'll expand on it: "Property" is a useful social tool for managing stuff that is scarce and which can't easily be shared. Food, tools, shelter, land, and so on. Property produces stability. People can count on having their stuff later, even if they're not using it at this instant. That lets them make longer-term plans, which, ideally, result in lots of different kinds of things becoming less scarce. Ideas and information, however, are not scarce. Any number of brains and storage media can hold them simultaneously. That's not true of a pizza. But for a long time "intellectual property" worked pretty well because the copying of ideas and information required significant effort and materials. Books had to be typeset and printed. Music had to be stamped onto vinyl or written onto tape, which needed specialized equipment. All this made it so that we could pretend that ideas and information were scarce. Now, that's not true anymore. Our technology has advanced to the point where the equipment for copying information is ubiquitous and unspecialized. We have to face the actual nature of information: It's not scarce. "Property" doesn't work on it anymore. Which really does leave artists and authors and other intellectual producers in a bad spot, since the time and effort involved in creating stuff hasn't gone down. We have this kind of thing now where it either doesn't exist at all or it exists in such abundance that the adjective is unneeded. How do we economically incentivize something like that? Personally, I lean towards the suspicion that for some kinds of things, mainly entertainment, we don't need to incentivize it anymore at all. People are not going to stop writing fiction and recording music just because it doesn't pay anymore. The real jam is in non-fiction, because that costs of making that stuff are higher than just food and shelter for the producer while they're writing. Research often requires travel, experimentation, equipment, materials. How do these get paid for?
- _DeadFred_ 6mo agoWhy? People are currently free to release all intellectual rights to what they release, so in theory these is already a intellectual property right free marketplace and people that want to create under that model creating.
- illist-ell1s 6mo agomostly effects the poor and ignorant so considered a minor issue
- gverrilla 6mo ago"property" as an idea has to go away
- Clamchop 6mo agoI agree in fractions. I think land ownership should be abolished. That'll never happen for a lot of reasons, but it's highly unethical in my opinion. Ignoring who the land was stolen from to begin with, I also feel that it's looting the future, land ownership often being generational and severely kneecapping society from making better, more productive use of a finite resource as its needs change over time. I do not think intellectual property should be abolished outright, because I can't think of a reliable incentive structure constructed entirely from the social interest. I do think it, particularly copyright, should be severely curtailed, however. Companies exclusively controlling huge swaths of popular culture for 90 years or whatever basically amounts to theft from the public commons, in my opinion. If you're going to replace folk culture with Mickey Mouse, then we ought to own a bit of that, more quickly than is being done. I have no issue with personal property and actually think it should be strengthened. Consider the right to repair; the right to run the software we choose on the devices we ostensibly own; the erosion of our ability to freely trade, share, and preserve increasingly digital products; stronger enforcement of Magnusson-Moss; infringements of our privacy in an online world; and so on.
- llbbdd 6mo agoWho was the land stolen from?
- rustcleaner 6mo ago*Conquered. All's fair in love and war.
- rustcleaner 6mo agoNo private person should be taxed for the space he needs to occupy to survive, that is slavery to the state! Return to allodial titles!
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- babypuncher 6mo ago"Intellectual property" is a hack we put together to make capitalism properly assign value to abstract ideas that we all agree have value, but are inherently devalued by free market forces. Capitalism by itself is incapable of valuing art and ideas beyond the marginal cost of producing duplicates, which has been on a steady downward trend since the invention of the printing press. Our economy is increasingly reliant on a class of product that is fundamentally incompatible with how capitalism works. Maybe rather than adding to the centuries old hack that is clearly falling apart, we need to rethink things from the ground up.
- lacy_tinpot 6mo agoWhat an incredible shallow reading of "capitalism". Capitalism doesn't "assign value" to anything. It can't assign value to anything. The value of something is determined only by a transaction. It's not assigned. The value of something is made apparent only after an exchanged is made. Otherwise there is no "inherent" or "assigned" value to anything. The value is made explicit only after a transaction is made. Abstract ideas don't really have value. Silicon Valley/Tech, which is perhaps the most ardent and exemplary capitalist industries today, does not assign value to abstract ideas. It assigns value to execution/tangible action.
- Dylan16807 6mo agoTheir point is that market forces push the value down to the marginal cost of copying. This complaint about "determining" versus "assigning" value is not important. And copyright does follow execution, not the abstract idea.
- m463 6mo agofor shame, you stole that idea: :) https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/bm1umw/intellectual_property_is_stupid_bullshit_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/bm1umw/in...
- rustcleaner 6mo agoYes, and the real piracy happens in the courtrooms, done by the "rights holders" without so much as a courtesy spit.
- casey2 6mo agoLengths just have to be reasonable, comparable to time in production (median of salaried employee-hours / median # of employees over the period) of the average item in a class. The vast majority of the private value is captured well within that time. It also keeps people honest and discourages rentseeking that isn't tied to labor. Ownership of intellectual property still matters, but right to copy&modify shouldn't last that long. It isn't hard to imagine another system of IP rights that provide value to the creator but not to the expense of society. Disney used public domain to build it's foundation then pulled up the ladder. Disney's market cap is lower than the damage longer copyright has caused, it's already been trillions, hundreds of trillions looking into the near future.