Submitted 11 months ago by zaxvenz@lemm.ee to technology@lemmy.world
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/13/jack-dorsey-and-elon-musk-would-like-to-delete-all-ip-law/
I’ve been on board with this for fucking years. Our IP system in the USA is so fucked. It’s like “death of the creator plus 40 years” or something and then Disney lobbies to increase it further to protect the mouse.
Let me make Mickey Mouse shirts and let me make money off of them!
Let me stream Nintendo games without a cease and desist!
Not to mention the fact that the stronger IP law is, the more it’s often used to exploit people.
Oh, did you as an artist get given stronger rights for your work? That platform you’re posting on demands that you give them a license for any possible use, in exchange for posting your art there to get eyeballs on your work.
Did your patents just get stronger enforcement? Too bad it’s conveniently very difficult to fund and develop any product at scale under that patent without needing outside investor funding into a new corporate entity that will own the patent, instead of you!
To loosely paraphrase from Cory Doctorow: If someone wants a stronger lock, but won’t give you the key, then it’s not for your benefit.
If corporations get to put locks on everything with keys they own, but also make it hard for you to get or enforce access to the keys to the locks on your stuff, then the simplest way to level the playing field is to simply eliminate the locks.
Wow. A white guy with money has an opinion. This is getting crazy! /s
If they did could we use the Twitter bird or Tesla logo all we wanted? I mean yeah let’s get rid of all IP law but get rid of it for everyone. If we want to copy a big corporation then yeah we should do that. Get rid of copyright and trademarks, woo! Publish all that hidden patented material so anyone can produce it. Let’s get creative. You think big corps will get on board with all this?
I don’t think Elon is that smart to realize what ‘delete all IP laws’ entails. He probably thinks it in the sense of an anarcho-capitalist.
Anarchy for me not for thee.
I mean, I’d like to get rid of IP Law too…
But I actually mean get rid of, not an “Under New Management” sense like Elon The Musky Husky wants
That would be a-m-a-z-i-n-g. Private game servers, fan remakes of shows and movies, I would be over the moon.
Too bad it won’t happen
Honestly, I’m a fan of abolishing IP law too, but for some reason I suspect the implementation of that they support is very different than the one I support
Be Weird, Download a Car, Generate Art, Screw Copyrights!
Can’t disagree here, this would be great
Disney vs Musk when?
Disney would smoke Musk
I was hoping Ken Penders would follow through on his threat to sue Paramount over Locke and Enerjak technically showing up in the Sonic 2 movie. (Characters who aren’t named, but have the same role as Locke and Enerjak show up… Wouldn’t matter if they were straight up wearing name tags saying “My name is Locke/My name is Enerjak”, the idea that Ken actually won his lawsuits is debunked fiction.)
Seriously, I wanted to see a judge explain to him that no he doesn’t own Knuckles or any Sonic character for that matter. And part of that is that “Settling out of court and being tossed some “Fuck off” money” and “Winning the lawsuit and naming your own terms to be obeyed and altered at your leisure” are two entirely different concepts… With the latter not really a thing outside of deluded day dreams.
I hate agreeing with these assholes, but I do in this case. IP/patent law is explicitly designed to stifle competition. At most, it should last a few years (if you agree with the “recoup the cost of innovation” argument). Innovation will be done for the sake of innovation if there’s competition though. If your opposition innovates and you don’t, you’re going to be destroyed. The exception is when they agree to not compete, which is already illegal though not enforced as strongly as it should be.
Right? There’s no reason Superman and Winnie The Pooh should fall under ANY copyright, everyone involved with the creation of both ins long dead… The only thing being protected is DC and Disney’s bottom line.
And the fact that Tarzan isn’t public domain is most absurd
Hell it took forever for Sherlock Holmes to be public domain, and the world he was created in doesn’t even remotely exist anymore.
I hate agreeing with these assholes, but I do in this case.
I guarantee you that neither of these assholes champion any kind of open access to their end works. Elon famously shut down the Twitter API and vexatiously litigated any number of Tesla copycats. Dorsey is only plugging an anti-IP stance because he’s got a new AI engine out and wants to get on board the “Stealing everyone’s DeviantArt library” gravy train. None of it is remotely sincere.
If your opposition innovates and you don’t, you’re going to be destroyed.
That’s simply not true. There are a myriad of historical examples as to it not being true, from the Japanese abolition of the gun during the Meiji Restoration to German telecoms clinging to copper wire data infrastructure despite fiber optics being obviously superior. If you don’t innovate because you have an economic incentive to drag your heels, and your economic clout gives you the ability to close out competitors, then you can do perfectly fine “innovating” in the field of anti-competitive trade behavior rather than real tech innovation.
What we have in Musk and Dorsey are two men who have benefited enormously from Silicon Valley insider investing and cheap borrowing. They don’t give a shit about other people’s IP in the same way Microsoft was more than happy to pillage code and reverse engineer software of its rivals. But if you think they’re going to apply that to their own codebase and personal economic interests… well…
vexatiously
Cool word
IIRC the original US copyright law as written by the founders was 25 years or so. The extensions on that have all been in the last 70 years or so due to mega corps like Disney.
The problem with Musk and Dorsey is that they want the copyright laws to apply to them but no one else. “Rules for thee but not for me” mentality of the wealthy.
Yeah, the problem was not the original copyright law which gave incentive for coming up with new ideas by giving you rights to that idea for long enough that you can be profitable, the problem is that it’s been extended to the point that the people who came up with the idea are long dead and it’s still under copyright for massive corporations.
This is going to be used corporations to take away everything from individuals who are innovating (more than they already are). Nobody will be able to build wealth off a good idea again. Which if we were in a society where wealth wasn’t required to live a good life I would be okay with, but we aren’t, so I’m not.
Maybe. That’s certainly their intent. I could also see it working the other way though. No more patent trolls or companies hoarding good ideas.
Hold on hold on. Don’t mention a damn thing
Well a billionaire commanded we argue about copyright law. I guess we need to expend our energy and build enough momentum so that Musk can grab more power during the turmoil.
Trumpers did their part by arguing about free speech. Time to tap into our issues with IP laws and help Musk too!
Oh no, this is so… good idea. Yarr! Pirate Party approves.
Delete all internet protocol law
… Delete… all… IP law?
So… just literally make all piracy legal, switch all gaming and tv show and movie consumption… to an optional donation model?
Fuck it, why not.
I am both an avid pirate and have a degree in econ, wrote papers as an undergrad on how to potentially reform the DMCA… and uh yeah, at this point yeah no one has any fucking idea how any thing works, everyone is an idiot, sure fuck it, blow it all up, why not.
Abolish IP for billionaires… not for the poor.
Free for people that already can afford anything.
Yeah except you know it isn’t going to be that
They’re going to go “yeah but not like that”
They’ll just remove consumer protections and make it so you own even less and if you try to fight it, you’ll have the full weight of the court system to make you poor
Is musk supports it, that’s exactly what he’s hoping will happen. The rich will be able to take advantage of it and the poor will either stay the same or get worse
This, he means abolish IP Law in terms of consumer protections.
also jam in there protections for AI training so they don’t have to deal with those pesky “authors”
“Delete all IP law” say people who have never created anything of any value to humanity.
Someone come up with a trump disloyalty pin. I will wear one. How about his profile in baby shit brown behind bars with the caption “Working on it felon 47”.
i’d also like to delete all billionaires
No! Why would you do that? When you can eat them instead
I don’t want to ingest that many second hand drugs.
Good luck bozo
This is the only thing he’s ever done or said that I agree with, even though his real intentions are obvious. We really do need a complete re-writing of IP law, but not from Elon.
i came in to say the same thing. IP law rarely benefits the working class. it’s usually a tool used by the likes of disney to bash peasants over the head. it also slows down innovation.
but the problem is, something like this is supposed to coincide with the end of capitalism and implementation of things like UBI.
yeah i agree with especially the last paragraph. i don’t think abandoning all IP laws today is realistic, as the commercial art/innovation economy still has too much game to gain so it’s gonna take at least 10 more years.
IP is simply a state backed monopoly privilege. This obviously leads to a slowing of innovation and price rises due to lack of (by force) competition. IP is unethical and doesn’t even accomplish what it sets out to do. You don’t need government promises of monopoly rights to create innovation in the marketplace, competition drives innovation.
All evidence points to the opposite of your conclusion.
In places where IP laws are weak or non-existent, very little fundamental or expensive research is done by companies - because the result is immediately cloned by 100 competitors. In medicine, companies will not research and develop new drugs to market unless they can get a return on the investment. Even in places with strong IP laws, development of drugs that can’t produce a return in the limited monopoly window is simply not done (eg with a small number of patients or when 1 course of a drug will permanently cure the patient), so many diseases do not have treatments.
In countries where there is strong IP laws, innovation jumps because innovating creates new things that people/companies can sell for profit. A personal area of interest is development of small-arms - every single advance from muskets to modern weapons is documented in patents in the US and Europe; the rate of innovation in the 19th and 20th centuries was incredible - and that is via patents and profit in the free market.
Now, we can have a productive argument about state sponsored research - but unless the state undertakes all research in an economy (which would be staggering overreach), we need IP laws.
We can also discuss patents on software (which IMHO are not needed because companies do fundamental research without patent laws like in the UK).
We can also discuss what is the appropriate time that copyright should remain - the Disney law in the US is a ridiculous overreach. It was 25 years or until the death of the author/artist - that worked very well for centuries.
You do
n’tneed government promises of monopoly rights to create innovation in the marketplace, competition drives innovation.
They don’t want to delete all IP law, they just want to delete the IP law which is preventing them from postponing the collapse of the AI hype a little bit more.
If they wanted to delete ALL IP Law, I’d move to have my Sonic fanfiction officially published.
Sally Acorn’s back in the canon if I say she is bro!
Why not get rid of the patent trolls, the monopolies shelving useful technologies through patent loopholes, the … Oh I see the tech billionaires again wanting to uproot a system because loopholes are just too much effort now.
God if every innovation stuck behind patent trolls was suddenly allowed to see the light of day, we’d basically solve the energy crisis overnight… and we’d see games that used the Nemesis System
I agree fully
This would be disastrous for actual manufacturing because a patent is the only thing that makes it worthwhile to spend a bunch of money upfront to develop a new technology. Unlike with software where you don’t have nearly as much up front capital investment to develop something, it costs millions of dollars to get a manufacturing process up and running and in a good enough state to where it can actually work out financially. Without patents, your competitor can just take all of that work and investment and just copy it with the benefit of doing it right the first time, so they’re able to undercut you on cost. The alternative is that everyone is super secretive about what they’re doing and no knowledge is shared, which is even worse. Patents are an awesome solution to this problem because they are public documents that explain how technologies work, but the law allows a monopoly on that technology for a limited amount of time. I also feel that in the current landscape, copyright is probably also good (although I would prefer it to be more limited) because I don’t want people who are actually coming up with new ideas having to compete with thousands of AI slop copycats ruining the market.
TL;DR- patents are good if you’re actually building things, tech bros are morons who think everything is software.
Getting rid of IP law basically makes mob tactics the only way to ensure compensation for investment in inventions.
In the manufacturing space, people are questioning if patents help them at all. There is no stopping China from copying your design and selling it on Aliexpress. In fact, since you’re almost certainly getting your product manufactured in China in the first place, there is no stopping the very manufacturing plant you’re using from producing extras and undercutting you.
Consider this old EEVblog vid about bringing a product to market, and the #1 tip is “don’t bother with a patent”: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7BL1O0xCcY
Patents have evolved to be useful to patent trolls. That’s it.
That’s not what Dorsey and Musk are after, though. They want to kill copyright law because it’s inconvenient for AI training data.
it costs millions of dollars to get a manufacturing process up and running and in a good enough state to where it can actually work out financially. Without patents, your competitor can just take all of that work and investment and just copy it with the benefit of doing it right the first time, so they’re able to undercut you on cost.
This argument makes no sense. Manufacturing lines are built all that time for unpatented products, plus a competitor can’t just “take all of that work and investment”, they will need to put in money to create their own product, even if it’s a copy they still need to make it work, as well as build their own production capacity.
They’ll be second to market, and presumably need to undercut price to get market share… This is a very risky endeavour, unless the profit margins are huge, and in which case, good thing that there’s no patents…
If the research is so costly and complex (pharmaceutical, aeronautical,…), then it should be at least partly funded by the government, through partnerships between universities and companies.
Patents are not a solution.
Manufacturing lines are built all that time for unpatented products,
And cheaply, because the research and productisation has been done by somebody else - this is an argument for patents
plus a competitor can’t just “take all of that work and investment”, they will need to put in money to create their own product,
Not true. One major issue is that many competitors literally copy the product exactly. Fake products wreck the original company
even if it’s a copy they still need to make it work,
That is 100x easier when you have a working product to clone
They’ll be second to market, and presumably need to undercut price to get market share… This is a very risky endeavour, unless the profit margins are huge, and in which case, good thing that there’s no patents…
The point is exactly that the fake product undercuts the original by a huge amount (they had no investment to pay off).
If the research is so costly and complex (pharmaceutical, aeronautical,…), then it should be at least partly funded by the government, through partnerships between universities and companies.
I agree that the government model makes sense for a lot of areas and products. But note that a government won’t invest millions or billions in developing a product if another country immediately fakes the product and prevents the government from collecting back the taxes it spent on the research.
As I discuss above there are lots of criticisms to the current IP laws - adjustment is 1000x better than abolishing a system that has driven research and development for several hundred years
Patent documents are rarely useful because they’re kept as general and opaque as possible to cover as many innovations as possible. I agree that it’s important to protect manufacturing, but patents are not the right way to go about it for at least two reasons: (1) they block innovation by design (e-ink screens are great examples) and (2) they create a huge barrier to entry for new ideas (think about how many lawyers are making a living on this) I disagree with the senders on so many things. But patents were invented in a world of monarchies and craftsmen. Time to go!
Patent documents are rarely useful because they’re kept as general and opaque as possible to cover as many innovations as possible.
I think this is a problem that can be fixed inside of patent system. Make it so by the end of patent life there is “how to build production line of this” manual.
Patents would be fine if the bar for “innovation” would be much higher, software patents weren’t a thing, there was way more research done into prior art, and there would be different (shorter) lengths for patents depending on what industry they target.
Like, if it’s manufacturing or something like drugs where it takes years before you can start making profit, sure, make them 10-20 years. If it’ something you make money off of immediately, it should be shorter.
Research is supposed to be publicly funded
Research is supposed to be public benefiting. Private funding just is bad at it.
Okay so at what point does it get handed off to private industry unless the government is just in business with manufacturers in a much more direct way than it is now? We’d need a completely different economic system for all research to be publicly funded. Consider this- often the way it works now is that a government funded researcher discovers a new molecule that could be useful. Then, private companies figure out how to make it industrially and run trials in pilot plants and design the plant to make it at scale. Should the government be doing all of that? This is extremely expensive, and I don’t know how you’d try to prioritize resources in the current economic system.
These people are threats our actual lives.
Avoiding tax loopholes and fair taxation for billionnaires could also be considered. Just saying. Otherwise I think that the idea of deleting all IP laws is just wishful (and naive) thinking, assuming people would cooperate and build on each other’s inventions/creations.
Given the state the world is currently in, I don’t see that happening soon.
Otherwise I think that the idea of deleting all IP laws is just wishful (and naive) thinking, assuming people would cooperate and build on each other’s inventions/creations.
Given the state the world is currently in, I don’t see that happening soon.
There are plenty of examples of open sharing systems that are functional.
Science, for example. Nobody ‘owns’ the formulas that calculate orbits or the underlying mathematics that AI models are built on like Transformer networks or convolutional networks. The information is openly shared and given away to everyone that wants it and it is so powerful it has completely reshaped society everywhere on the Earth (except the Sentinel Islands).
Open Source projects, like Linux, are the foundation of the modern tech world. The ‘IP’ is freely available and you can copy or modify it as much as you’d like. Linus ‘owns’ the Linux project but anyone is free to take a copy of the Linux source code and modify it to whatever extent that they would like and form their own project.
Much of the software and services that people use are built on top of open source tools made by volunteers, for free; and most of the useful knowledge and progress for human society results from breakthroughs made in the sciences, who’s discoveries are also free and openly shared.
I agree with most of what you say, nevertheless I’d like to underline that my context was broader and not limited to Linux and open source, but to a greater extend to topics like inequality, world hunger, wars, access to infrastructure, education and healthcare for example.
Plenty of chemical syntheses are patented. Biological catalysts and precursors are patented every day. No one owns the rights to orbital calculations, because that would be like patenting the concept of a square root — it’s not novel or even complex within the field.
HalfSalesman@lemm.ee 11 months ago
As much as I also would like IP law to die, I do not think that these two saying such means much.
Jack Dorsey is not in government and worth a 100th of what Musk is worth. And Elon Musk is evil and retarded.