That would just ensure that no one ever commits resources to developing something new…
Comment on Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk would like to ‘delete all IP law’ | TechCrunch
Dekkia@this.doesnotcut.it 6 days ago
I’m fully in favour of abolishing IP law for everyone, ideally globally.
Public domain everything.
Ulrich@feddit.org 6 days ago
Atropos@lemmy.world 6 days ago
It’ll affect it, but it won’t stop it.
I design medical devices. IP is incredibly important in this process to protect our R&D investment. If IP didn’t exist, we’d protect that through other means like obfuscation of function.
Also if IP didn’t exist, I could design devices that are so much better at healing people. So much of what I do is restricted because someone else has 30 years left on what they patented.
R&D is expensive. Just because you see what someone else did, doesn’t mean you can easily replicate it.
In short: if your goal is pure profit, yeah removing IP probably hurts this a little. If your goal is producing the best product, then get rid of it.
dylanmorgan@slrpnk.net 6 days ago
Cory Doctorow has made a pretty convincing argument that in your real specifically, all designs should be open source. That way, if a company goes bankrupt or simply stops supporting a device, like (say) an implant that allows them to see, or a pacemaker, or whatever, they can pursue repairs without the help of the OEM.
dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 days ago
Open source is effectively no different than public domain in this situation. You don’t have less rights
JeSuisUnHombre@lemm.ee 6 days ago
Capitalism stifles innovation
Ulrich@feddit.org 6 days ago
So much of what I do is restricted because someone else has 30 years left on what they patented.
If they didn’t patent it, that technology never would have existed in the first place for you to steal from.
I think the best solution would be a much shorter exclusionary period for patents.
100% agreed on that account.
In short: if your goal is pure profit, yeah removing IP probably hurts this a little
“A little”? If there’s no IP you just pay a janitor or an employee a million bucks to send you all the information and documentation and you manufacture the product yourself and undercut the company actually engineering the product so they can never be profitable.
Like, this all seems very obvious to me…
theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world 6 days ago
that technology never would have existed in the first place
Oh gee, a wildly incorrect assumption
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 6 days ago
People made stuff before patents existed. In many cases there were certain people and groups that were soight out because they simply did things better than others who made the same things.
Knowing how someone else makes something doesn’t mean you can make it as well as the other person. Making quality goods is the same as cooking meals, the people and techniques are far more important than the designs.
heavydust@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
I design medical devices
I also design medical devices. You are protected from all the laws and regulations (Hello 62304!!!) that prevent companies from selling random crap to hospitals.
electricyarn@lemmy.world 6 days ago
People famously invented nothing before copyright law.
theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world 6 days ago
No no no the world has always worked the way my flawed ideology requires!!!
Ulrich@feddit.org 6 days ago
The internet famously didn’t exist before copyright law. People also famously steal all IP in China.
theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world 6 days ago
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Request_for_Comments
Your choice example of technology to support IP laws is… something that was created publically and is a collection of open, public standards 🤦🤦🤦 do you think the internet is patented…? By who??? Lmao
merc@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
That’s why the Sistine Chapel has the little © 1512 painted in the corner
barkingspiders@infosec.pub 6 days ago
Did you not notice that almost the entire realm of technology runs on open source software largely written by volunteers? Yes your laptop may run a proprietary piece of software but not the servers it talks to, your phone, your apps, the cash register at the store, the computer chip in your kids toys etc…
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Now imagine if ip laws were removed. Any company could take open source work and sell it as their own while ignoring any GPL that requires the source code to be distributed.
Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I would point at Android as an example of what would happen. It’s not public domain but the end result is similar, namely that the open source originator (AOSP) suffers from a severe lack of features compared to the commercial offerings.
The default AOSP apps are incredibly barebones compared to the ones Google and the carriers put in their ROMs. You have to choose between “have nothing more than the basic features and compatibility with only well-established services” or “get the latest and greatest with all the bells and whistles (plus a huge heaping of telemetry and invasive advertising)”.
It turns out it’s really hard to compete with a major corporation who can throw entire teams at a problem and can legally copy anything you add to your own version. That’s not even getting into the things that open source projects lack due to their haphazard team structure such as unified UX designs (Blender pre-2.8 and GIMP pre-3.0/unified window mode being the most famous examples of terrible user interfaces that lingered for far too many years).
Ulrich@feddit.org 6 days ago
Do you not notice that those volunteers have bills to pay and need jobs and income from somewhere? The world doesn’t run on goodwill.
theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world 6 days ago
So… what, are you denying that open source software exists because people have to pay bills…?
barkingspiders@infosec.pub 6 days ago
Yet they did it anyway, my point is about the power of our intrinsic motivation to create, not our obvious need for food and shelter etc…
JeSuisUnHombre@lemm.ee 6 days ago
That’s only true of the too few people that control too much resources
Ulrich@feddit.org 6 days ago
Huh?
JeSuisUnHombre@lemm.ee 6 days ago
The large majority of resources and facilities are owned by a small minority of wealthy individuals whose only goal is making money. People with more interest and passion in the field in question would continue to innovate as long as they had the resources to do so.
inmatarian@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Not strictly true, if we’re talking about pharmaceuticals or other types of trade information, it would lead us back to a world of fiercely guarded corporate secrets. Here’s your medicine drug, but we won’t tell you anything about how its made or whats in it.
FriendlyBeagleDog@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 days ago
Not necessarily? You’d retain first-to-market advantages, particularly where implementation is capital-heavy - and if that’s not enough you could consider an alternative approach to rewarding innovation such as having a payout or other advantage for individuals or entities which undertake significant research and development to emerge with an innovative product.
I think the idea that nobody would commit to developing anything in the absence of intellectual property law is also maybe a bit too cynical? People regularly do invest resources into developing things for the public domain.
At the very least, innovations developed with a significant amount of public funding - such as those which emerge from research universities with public funding or collaborative public-private endeavours at e.g. pharmaceutical companies - should be placed into the public domain for everybody to benefit from, and the copyright period should be substantially reduced to something more like five years.
Ulrich@feddit.org 6 days ago
Felt like it was pretty clearly hyperbolic.
People who work in public domain also need jobs to sustain their ability to do so.
FriendlyBeagleDog@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 days ago
Yes, but sometimes producing for the public domain is their job. Sponsorships, grants, and other funding instruments exist for people who do work which is committed to the public domain.
libra00@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Right, because no one ever does anything for reasons other than money. You definitely get paid to clean up the neighborhood park or help your buddy move right?
Ulrich@feddit.org 6 days ago
Right, because no one ever does anything for reasons other than money.
Of course they do. What they don’t do is spend millions of dollars in R&D only to have that researched duplicated by someone else who then sells the same product for a quarter of the price…
libra00@lemmy.world 5 days ago
You’re right, no one spends millions of dollars in R&D without expecting to earn a profit from it…
They spend hundreds of billions instead.
President Biden’s budget proposal for FY2025 includes approximately $201.9 billion for R&D, $7.4 billion (4%) above the FY2024 estimated level of $194.6 billion (see figure). Adjusted for inflation to FY2023 dollars, the President’s FY2025 R&D proposal represents a constant-dollar increase of 1.5% above the FY2024 estimated level.
Dekkia@this.doesnotcut.it 6 days ago
Nobody does anything anymore and we’ll all just die. Gotcha.
Ulrich@feddit.org 6 days ago
Yes that’s totally what I said.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Busting of telecom monopolies doesn’t lead to nobody building telecom infrastructure. And without state monopoly on alcohol production alcohol drinks don’t become a deficit. They just become cheaper and less incentivizing - that’s considered, but you have to solve deadlocks.
Ulrich@feddit.org 6 days ago
I don’t understand what any of that has to do with the topic at hand…?
libra00@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I agree with your overall point and am not trying to argue against it, but rather to provide an interesting historical fact: I happen to know of one example where this did in fact lead to nobody building telecom infrastructure in an area.
I lived in Albuquerque, NM in the late 90s/early 2000s when telcos were rolling out DSL infrastructure across the country. The local telco, US West, refused to do so (largely because their POTS network was aging and rickety at the best of times - the phone line hookup to my apartment building was still using old gel-pack connectors from the 60s), even after being taken to court over it, and happily paid $200k/mo in fines for a couple years to avoid doing so. It wasn’t until US West was bought out by Qwest in 2000 that they finally rolled out DSL. I am generally extremely anti-monopoly so I think the break-up was definitely a good thing, but I attribute this to the break-up because a larger company would be in a better position to mitigate the costs of upgrading the infrastructure in one area with the profits from another or whatever.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 4 days ago
because a larger company would be in a better position to mitigate the costs of upgrading the infrastructure in one area with the profits from another or whatever.
In this case it appears that it was a small monopoly. Where I live one can generally change a telco without changing your physical exact location. Lots of clumsy wires though under the ceiling near the elevator.
But that was off topic, I’ll add one small point - a bigger company could do what you described too.
theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world 6 days ago
[deleted]Ulrich@feddit.org 6 days ago
Thank you for the redundant and unnecessarily rude commentary.
Lightor@lemmy.world 5 days ago
This is a horrible idea. Why would an author dedicate years of their life to a book only to make no money off of it. Why would I spend time and money prototyping a new invention only to not see a dime from it as a big company steals my idea.
You could literally write the next Lord of the Rings and another company could print and sell the book, sell merch, and make a movie about it and you’d see 0 money. But no one would make movies any more because what’s the point?
People think about getting an the stuff from companies for free and forget that big companies would benefit most with no protection to the little guy.
yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de 5 days ago
The rich want to do it because of AI. That’s it.
They can already take whatever you create wihout giving you a dime. What are you gonna do, sue a multi-billion dollar company with a fleet of attorneys on standby? With what money?
They would certainly just settle and give you a pittance just about large enough to cover your attorney fees.
Do you know why companies usually don’t do this? Because they have sufficiently many people hired who do nothing but create stories for the company full time. They do not need your ideas.
Copyright didn’t exist for millenia. It didn’t stop authors from writing books.
Lightor@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Small companies have defend themselves from Apple. People make money from their inventions and writings. There are tons of examples.
They also don’t want it just because of AI, this would enable them to steal and mass produce any IP anyone makes. This includes physical inventions.
Also copyright didn’t exist for a long time and neither did the Internet or global trade. Times change. We went millennia without many things, it doesn’t automatically make them wrong or bad. What a silly basis.
yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de 4 days ago
The cases where large companies do win won’t make news though. “Large companies settles with individual” isn’t really headline material now, is it?
Also, small companies != people. Neither me nor you are a company and even small companies have significantly more resources available to them than someone who just created the next Lord of the Rings and didn’t see a penny.
There are significantly more companies who would rather start killing politicians than see IP law gone. They rake in billions of shareholder value, much moreso than any AI company out there.
I never argued that copyright law is necessarily wrong or bad just because we went millenia without it. What I am arguing is that these laws do not allow people to create intellectual works as people in the past were no less artistic than we are today - maybe even moreso.
Have you seen the impact of IP law on science? It’s horrible. No researcher sees any money from their works - rather they must pay to lose their “rights” and have papers published. Scientific journals have hampered scientific progress and will continue to do so for as long as IP law remains. I would not be surprised if millions of needless deaths could have been prevented if only every medical researcher had access to research.
IP law serves solely large companies and independent artists see a couple of breadcrumbs. Abolishing IP law - or at the very least limiting it to a couple of years at most - would have hardly any impact on small artists. The vast, vast, VAST majority of artists make hardly any money already. Just check Bandcamp or itch.io and see how many millions of artists there are who will never ever see success. They do not benefit from IP law - so why should we keep it for the top 0.1% of artists who do?
Dekkia@this.doesnotcut.it 4 days ago
You’re right. As we all know people only started to create art after IP laws where established.
Nobody ever made something original just for the joy of it. It’s only fair that a single company has the exclusive rights on a pants-wearing mouse that looks a certain way for 95 years.
Lightor@lemmy.world 4 days ago
This is a bad faith argument.
Forms of IP have existed for a long time. And back in your days you didn’t have one company that could have global reach in second.
You still ignore the fact that if I spend 5 years of my life writing a book, it could be taken away with no money to me. So people can no longer dedicate their lives to creating when they have bills to pay.
Dekkia@this.doesnotcut.it 4 days ago
Have you considered that the problem of not being able to create art for recreational purposes without thinking about its monetary value is the actual issue here?
floofloof@lemmy.ca 6 days ago
I suspect that isn’t the picture these two have in mind. It’s going to be the same as the demand for free speech, which just turns out to mean “let me be an asshole and you’re not allowed to complain.” This one is going to be “I get to profit off your ideas, but you’re not allowed to use mine.”