People famously invented nothing before copyright law.
Comment on Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk would like to ‘delete all IP law’ | TechCrunch
Ulrich@feddit.org 1 month agoThat would just ensure that no one ever commits resources to developing something new…
electricyarn@lemmy.world 1 month ago
theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world 1 month ago
No no no the world has always worked the way my flawed ideology requires!!!
Ulrich@feddit.org 1 month ago
The internet famously didn’t exist before copyright law. People also famously steal all IP in China.
theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world 1 month 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
Ulrich@feddit.org 1 month ago
Your choice example of technology to support IP laws is… something that was created publically and is a collection of open, public standards
No 🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️ you’re intentionally misrepresenting my statement.
merc@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
That’s why the Sistine Chapel has the little © 1512 painted in the corner
barkingspiders@infosec.pub 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month ago
So… what, are you denying that open source software exists because people have to pay bills…?
Ulrich@feddit.org 1 month ago
The point is every business cannot be a volunteer organization.
barkingspiders@infosec.pub 1 month 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 1 month ago
That’s only true of the too few people that control too much resources
Ulrich@feddit.org 1 month ago
Huh?
JeSuisUnHombre@lemm.ee 1 month 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.
Ulrich@feddit.org 1 month ago
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.
But…they don’t. And if you removed IP law then they still wouldn’t…
fossilesque@mander.xyz 1 month ago
Read Debt by David Graeber
eronth@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Instead of explaining what you mean, you’re just going to casually suggest they read a roughly 500 page book and hope that clears it up for them?
Ulrich@feddit.org 1 month ago
No.
inmatarian@lemmy.world 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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.
Ulrich@feddit.org 1 month ago
Yes, but sometimes producing for the public domain is their job.
Which is paid for most often by proprietary companies. Take a look at the OBS webpage.
libra00@lemmy.world 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month ago
Nobody does anything anymore and we’ll all just die. Gotcha.
Ulrich@feddit.org 1 month ago
Yes that’s totally what I said.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 month 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 1 month ago
I don’t understand what any of that has to do with the topic at hand…?
libra00@lemmy.world 1 month 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 1 month 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.
libra00@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Sure, and I haven’t used a telco in ~20 years unless you count cell carriers. But yeah I’m by no means saying bigger companies are necessarily better about this, as I said, just that this is a curious counter-example to your earlier claim that breaking up the telco monopoly didn’t lead to nobody building telecom infrastructure.
theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world 1 month ago
[deleted]Ulrich@feddit.org 1 month ago
Thank you for the redundant and unnecessarily rude commentary.
Atropos@lemmy.world 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month ago
Open source is effectively no different than public domain in this situation. You don’t have less rights
JeSuisUnHombre@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Capitalism stifles innovation
Ulrich@feddit.org 1 month ago
If they didn’t patent it, that technology never would have existed in the first place for you to steal from.
100% agreed on that account.
“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 1 month ago
Oh gee, a wildly incorrect assumption
Ulrich@feddit.org 1 month ago
Oh gee, a rational contradiction supported with evidence.
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 1 month 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.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 1 month ago
That was fine before mass production made perfect copies possible on an industrial scale.
You don’t need the person when you can copy the object and produce it at volume and scale because you already own the factories.
Ulrich@feddit.org 1 month ago
People also didn’t make stuff before patents existed.
No, but often you can. You also don’t have to, you just have to make it cheaper, which you can because you are benefitting from the investment from someone else.
heavydust@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
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.