Comment on 'An embarrassing failure of the US patent system': Videogame IP lawyer says Nintendo's latest patents on Pokémon mechanics 'should not have happened, full stop'

• floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Personally I don’t have an issue with individual intellectual property, it’s the acquisition and trade of it by corporations that I have an issue with. For example, I believe no copyright should last after the creator’s death. Disney is dead, Tolkien is dead, many musicians are dead, let alive creators contribute to their worlds.

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  • Adalast@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I have a real issue here too. Though mine more centers around the purchase of IP to bury it because it would be competition. How many amazing creations that would benefit humanity and make all of our lives more livable are buried in archives at these big corpos?

    This is what I would like to see fixed, in the most aggressive way possible. I want a clock on the ownership to bring a product to market based on the purchased patant and if that clock runs out, ownership reverts back to the creator.

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  • QuoVadisHomines@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Walt Disney wasn’t the creator of most of his works.

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  • echodot@feddit.uk ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That isn’t the problem.

    Copyright law does run out after a while it’s not immediately upon the holders death but after their death there’s a grace period and then the copyright runs out.

    The problem is the likes of Disney get special treatment. Their patents should have run out long before any of us were born and yet they didn’t.

    The problem isn’t the system itself, the problem is the abuse of the system.

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    • floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      No. The problem is that that system was created and lobbied for literally by Disney and other big “IP holders” like music labels. That “while” after the holder’s death has been increasing to ridiculous levels. They are not getting special treatment by abusing the system, they’re changing the system to their rules. Image (source)

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      • Canonical_Warlock@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Just an FYI, that graph is entirely unreadable in dark mode. I’m not sure why they chose to make a graph of all things have a transparent background.

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• bonus_crab@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Intellectual property is a means of production after its released. It requires no further input from the creator, and so they shouldnt have a monopoly over it.

  If the internet actually enforced copyright to the letter of the law, it wouldnt exist in its current form. No memes, no game streamers or videogame youtubers, no unlicensed music, no image sharing. Copyright needs to be defended to the best of the holders ability otherwise they lose it. It would necessitate a constant stream of scanning and policing and litigation thatd be so taxing on platforms theyd just shut down. Video game streaming operates in a legal grey zone because the law is flawed.

  Theres a reason programming tools are almost all open source. From languages to libraries to software, the alternative is just too inefficient.

  Copyright is an old shitty system from the days when books required publishers who had to register an ISBN for everything they published. The modern equivalent would be if every unique copyrightable contribution on the internet first required submitting the media to a government agency to store a hash of it and issue a UUID.

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  • chiliedogg@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Let’s say you design a revolutionary widget of some kind, but don’t have the means to to produce it at scale. How do you get it to market? You parter with a larger company. For a share of the proceeds, you have them produce the item. Without a patent, when you go to the manufacturer and show them the design, they can just start making it themselves and tell you to beat sand.

    Also, patents require competitive companies to alter a product design in order to sell it. If everyone could just copy the same product, there would be further incentive to monopolize the means of production to produce the single product at a larger scale, since the only differentiation between products would be the price. Patents allow competition through limited-term protection of their innovations.

    Is the patent system abused by large companies? Absolutely. But removing patents won’t make them.good actors. It’ll just remove any limitations on their theft.

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  • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Intellectual property is a means of production after its released. It requires no further input from the creator, and so they shouldnt have a monopoly over it.

    If the person who created it cannot profit from it, then nobody should be able to.

    I think most artists would agree (unless they’re specifically interested in the concept of freely distributing their work).

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    • luciferofastora@feddit.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      There should be a mechanism to reward artists for their work and enable them to keep creating, but without also allowing a system of vampires to control that mechanism and enslave them in a twisted web of dependency and power.

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      • Soggy@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        cough UBI cough

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  • floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    If the internet actually enforced copyright to the letter of the law

    Whose law? Whose enforcers? The Internet is fundamentally incompatible with traditional sovereignty and jurisdiction concepts

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• surph_ninja@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Artists and creators already don’t control their intellectual property. The megacorporations do, and they have always violated the intellectual property rights of small artists with little to no consequences.

  Intellectual property laws are a recent and catastrophic mistake. For the majority of the history of our species, no one could retain sole ownership of art. And it was better. We make the best art when we trade it back & forth and reiterate on it.

  We should scrap intellectual property laws, and heavily tax corporate AI use to fund a national artists stipend to provide them a good standard of living.

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• ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  If you want a capitalist society it needs to die.

  If Trump can sell Springsteen’s music cheaper than Springsteen then that’s just the free market.

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  • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Exactly. And why would Springsteen have any incentive to distribute (or ultimately, even record maybe) any of his music in this proposed reality?

    Not a fan of Springsteen, was just the first example that came to mind.

    I’m just trying to imagine the incalculable amount of great music we would have been deprived of had we been living in a world without IP laws.

    They might have written them, but we’d never get to hear it.

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• Doomsider@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  To answer your first question no.

  Intellectual property is a societal construct and it is as real as racism is. Which isn’t saying much.

  If an artist doesn’t want their music to be heard and possibly replicated, altered, or used in a way they don’t like then it is their responsibility to never release it. Only by hiding it can they keep the world from misusing it.

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  • MotoAsh@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    rofl pure stupidity

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    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      The thing that irks me the most is that everyone who disagrees is an idiot or a liberal or some shit. No matter how grounded and nuanced your take is.

      Every leftist has their own, ultra specific orthodoxy, and they will always find something about yours that makes you “not a real leftist.”

      Nothing new either, it’s happened countless times. It’s so self-sabotaging.

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      • Doomsider@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        You have no take other than approving the purchase and sale of our culture controlled by corporations.

        You say IP is for the little guy, the average federal copyright lawsuit cost a quarter of a million dollars to pursue.

        You have no clue about remix culture which was destroyed by profiteers. Corporations control the majority of artist’s commercial music. Many artists don’t own their own work.

        Corporations constantly steal IP. AI has shown us that they don’t respect the very laws they created.

        The only person living in a dystopia and living it is you. The abolishment of IP would cause an explosion of science and art like the world hasn’t seen since they created laws to prevent it.

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    • Doomsider@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Whatever you say Motoass!

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      • MotoAsh@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Insults and nothing else? Thanks for proving you’re nothing but a petulant child who does not understand the real world.

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• SlothMama@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I also believe all intellectual property laws shouldn’t exist, so patent, copyright, and trademark.

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• daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I do believe that.

  Intellectual property leads to all kind of unfairness. It should be normalized that artist would be paid for the work done, nor for property ownership.

  This adds to some other believes about people shouldn’t be paid just for “property ownership”.

  And once the art is done and released is part of human race, that does include terrible human beings, but it also includes absolutely everyone else.

  Some other argument for this… For instance, being an artist is one of the jobs with biggest pay disparity, from the poorest of them all to some of the richest. That’s a normal output of basing income on property ownership, things snowball once you have enough property.

  I don’t think there’s a way to make private property (physical or intelectual) work in a fair economy. And remember, private property is not the same as personal property, just in case.

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  • echodot@feddit.uk ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    People need to be compensated for their work, that may end up being an awful lot and probably in excess of what they need, but that’s how it has to work. Any other system would just disincentivize people from putting in the effort, in fact it would force them not to because they would have to do something else in order to earn enough money to live. The precise opposite of your desired outcome would happen, the rich would produce endless amounts of content just to more money, and all the smaller artists would have to go and get a job in Costco or something.

    The only way your idea would work is if we completely change the economic system and got rid of money. Which I’m all in favour of but I suspect is probably outside of the scope of copyright law.

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  • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    You live in a dream world. Why would I release my music to the public when there are people who will make a living stealing it, putting their name on it, and selling 1000x more than you ever could because they already have name recognition? And those people WILL exist for every form of creative content.

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    • Doomsider@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      99+% of art is never sold. The vast majority of artist don’t make money. Who really cares about the extreme minority who use capitalism to control our culture. They don’t get to decide what the rest of the world does purely for their economic interests.

      No they don’t need any mechanism. The arts and sciences existed for thousands of years without modern silly interpretations for commercial interests.

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      • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        So for the artists that created works but did not sell them, you believe that they would be fine with someone else photocopying it and then selling it themselves?

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    • ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yeah… victory belonging to the person with the widest reach and deepest pockets rather than the originator of the material/idea is one way to ensure that all creatives become paupers. This is one of those many on-paper ideas that, without the upheaval of pretty much every other established human social structure, would be awful in practice.

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      • kureta@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Yeah… victory belonging to the person with the widest reach

        I thought you were going to say something about Spotify for a moment.

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    • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Because you will be paid for it?

      In the current world I could torrent your music and you’ll be “losing money” and will end up investing more work in anti-piracy and advertisement than in making good music.

      If instead you would be paid for the making of the music regardless of how many copies of a digital file you sold by a better system that’s not based on private property and the means of capitalism, it would mean that you could 100% focus on making music and everyone could enjoy the things you made.

      Everyone will be happy, except investors and people thriving of this inefficient and unfair system.

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      • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Ok but you’re literally describing a utopia. That is not a world that exists in reality.

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      • AgentRocket@feddit.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        If instead you would be paid for the making of the music regardless of how many copies of a digital file you sold by a better system that’s not based on private property

        And how would that system decide how much you get paid and where would the money for that payment come from? How do you make sure a carefully crafted piece of music, that brings happiness to millions of people gets paid fairly compared to someone just putting together a song in 5 minutes by pressing random notes on the keyboard?

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• zrst@lemmy.cif.su ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It’s imaginary property. It’s not real and only exists in our heads. Saying someone stole your “intellectual property” is akin to saying they “stole your idea.”

  It is about the money, as well.

  If you want to prioritize controlling what others can do with an idea, then nobody should be able to restrict someone else from doing what they want with an idea.

  Bruce Springsteen will just have to grow up and get over it.

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  • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    So just no music business then?

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    • Doomsider@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      [deleted]

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      • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Where did I say that it did?

        I’m just trying to picture what this world would actually look like, and it seems shit.

        People will still create music, but without having any sense of ownership over it whatsoever, there is zero incentive to distribute it.

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    • ChairmanMeow@programming.dev ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It may surprise you to know that people produced music before IP laws existed.

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    • Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      No art, no poetry, no video games. . .

      IMO creators should have better protections - the current laws don’t seem to stop AI gobbling up their work. But at the same time this Nintendo thing is obviously bullshit. I’m surprised the court allowed it. Probably a decision made by a very old Christian man who doesn’t understand what games are and can’t use a smartphone.

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      • Soggy@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Pretty neat how capitalists invented art and it isn’t at all an intrinsic part of the human experience since at least 40,000 years ago.

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      • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Yeah it’s clearly broken. But there is a complete lack of nuance in these “get rid of IP and copyright completely (and if you disagree you’re an idiot)” arguments.

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