If those two shitheads said we should drink more water I’d check with other sources first.
Fuck them. I hope they both die for what they’ve done
Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk would like to ‘delete all IP law’ | TechCrunch
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/
Comments
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 11 months ago
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
W00T I fully agree. It’s one of those weird moments that I actually agree with scammer Elmo. I’m sure I’m agreeing for different reasons than he’s saying it, but here we are.
sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml 11 months ago
ScrambledEggs@lazysoci.al 11 months ago
The only reason musk would want this is to put his name officially on ideas he bought. Presumably on patents and whatnot.
hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
dylanmorgan@slrpnk.net 11 months ago
I think Disney might have a few things to say about that.
Along with every other film studio, record company, publisher, video game studio…
…engineering firm, architecture firm…
…pharma company, law firm…
Gullible@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Saying something and putting it into action are entirely different. If he does it, I will personally build a statue of musk.
HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org 11 months ago
Hey, the broken clock’s right!
IP law always had a built-in scale pronlem. Without a registration-required copyright model, and probably some sort of mandatory licensing rate system, the sheer logistics of finding and arranging rights made a lot of business models inpractical. (For example, why aren’t modern bookstores just print-on-demand kiosks, or streaming services have All The Content? In large part because it would cost thousands to track down owners and negotiate terms for $1.87 in royalties multiplied by every item in the catalog.)
This was ignorable for a long time, or even a commercial advantage for firms with access to large, pre-negotiated catalogs. The AI boom created a surprise market of non-incumbents who need to get access to a lot of IP in a streamlined manner.
If we open the door for bulk IP clearance to grant the AI bubble a stro ger legal footing, it can also allow other, potentially more interesting business ideas to slip through.
Unmapped@lemmy.ml 11 months ago
Unexpected good elon take. Patents and copyright laws have probably held us back at least 50 years worth in advancements.
verdigris@lemmy.ml 11 months ago
Except what he actually wants is for AI companies to be free to slurp whatever they want, but for average joes to still have the book thrown at them for pirating the Adobe suite.
gedaliyah@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I’d be in favor of a phase out of IP law. It would probably require a LOT more public investment in the arts and sciences. But public funding would lead to public ownership, so society would benefit on the whole.
No one would be getting rich off of creative works, but we would want to be sure that people will still make a living.
Or UBI would work even better.
primemagnus@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
As a creative with many friends in the industry, go fuck yourselves! You can pry my IPs from my cold dead fingers.
verdigris@lemmy.ml 11 months ago
Yeah man, pull that ladder up behind you!
Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 months ago
In what sense is a ladder getting pulled up if IP is respected? Anyone can make a new IP, there’s not a limited supply of imagination. You can’t make everyone like what you come up with or buy it, but why should that entitle you to being able to profit off someone else’s work?
primemagnus@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
If Elon agrees with anything… run.
athairmor@lemmy.world 11 months ago
This isn’t as forward thinking as you’d want it to be.
For as much as they are abused, “IP laws” protect small and individual inventors, writers, composers, etc.
With no patent, copyright or trademark protections the billionaires will own or bury everything.
What is needed is to bring the laws back to their intended purpose.
merc@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
For as much as they are abused, “IP laws” protect small and individual inventors, writers, composers, etc.
Do they? Or do they protect the huge companies that those people have to assign their IP to?
gramie@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
But how much do IP laws actually protect the little guy? When a large corporation can bankrupt me by prolonging litigation until I have nothing left, what leverage do I really have?
There are certainly cases where small creators and inventors were able to overcome this disadvantage, but I suspect that they are the tiny minority, celebrated when they do achieve it.
Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 months ago
The imbalance against giant corporations isn’t anything to sneeze at, but there are just as many (probably more) small time companies breaking copyright law and hoping nobody notices. For example, stealing artwork to print on cheap crap that you sell below what the creator is selling them for. If they’re in an area that recognizes that copyright then they’re going to lose every time, and they’re not going to have enough money to drag it out. After that happens artists can recover all the earnings that were made with their work. Without that the artist is just fucked.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 11 months ago
With no patent, copyright or trademark protections the billionaires will own or bury everything.
Trademark protection - yes, it’s very important. Same as authorship vs copyright, copyright might be harmful, but authorship is necessary to protect.
If “delete all IP law” means that you can’t be sued for using something copyrighted, like, say, openly using Opera Presto leaked sources or making a Nintendo console emulator, and that you can’t be sued for rounded corners, and that you can’t be sued for using some proprietary hardware interface without royalties, - then it may be good.
But I think these people are after copyleft.
Still, interesting, how many different people are today implementing what was being discussed in very vague strokes 10-15 years ago. All of it at the same time, breaking everything. I mean really all of it. Signal is one of the common ideas, Musk’s DOGE is another, federation model being alive again is another, and all the ghouls around. A full Brazilian carnival of grotesque ideas. I want my childhood back (Signal is cool, but the rest is not).
conditional_soup@lemm.ee 11 months ago
That last sentence is it. IP laws are outrageous monstrosities these days, with folks like Disney getting 100-year long exclusive IP rights to characters and stuff like the DMCA.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
Fundamentally it should be an attribution and reward system, whereas currently it’s a false scarcity system.
HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org 11 months ago
The problem with attribution is the difficulty of 1000% accurate compliance.
If you grab 100 lines of code from a repository, or five paragraphs from a story, there’s probably a claim there. If you grab a single word, there’s probably not. But in the middle, there’s a paralysis of uncertainty-- is n lines similar enough to create liability? Can you remember where you saw what reliably? You end up with a bias towards “over-attribution” and it becomes difficult to pare it back. Does everything need a full Git-style commit history? Are we forever stuck keeping a credit on a project because it’s difficult to prove you’ve fully scrubbed their contributions?
Focus on how we pay artists (ideally lush grants) and forget about credit. Maybe establish a culture where it’s voluntary and acceptable-- that people feel that they’re allowed to cite their raw materials, and reuse doesn’t make the work lesser-- but don’t try to use the courts to force people to try to remember and track where they saw something when they just want to create, or it creates a hostile environment.
artificialfish@programming.dev 11 months ago
Would be amazing. Legal piracy of everything, generics and knock offs, love it.
Ulrich@feddit.org 11 months ago
Interesting considering the lack of IP law is going to become Tesla’s downfall.
Dekkia@this.doesnotcut.it 11 months ago
I’m fully in favour of abolishing IP law for everyone, ideally globally.
Public domain everything.
Lightor@lemmy.world 11 months 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.
Dekkia@this.doesnotcut.it 11 months 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.
yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months 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.
floofloof@lemmy.ca 11 months 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.”
Ulrich@feddit.org 11 months ago
That would just ensure that no one ever commits resources to developing something new…
Dekkia@this.doesnotcut.it 11 months ago
Nobody does anything anymore and we’ll all just die. Gotcha.
FriendlyBeagleDog@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 months 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.
libra00@lemmy.world 11 months 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?
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 11 months 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.
barkingspiders@infosec.pub 11 months 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…
electricyarn@lemmy.world 11 months ago
People famously invented nothing before copyright law.
Atropos@lemmy.world 11 months 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.
JeSuisUnHombre@lemm.ee 11 months ago
That’s only true of the too few people that control too much resources
veeesix@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
So delete all pharmaceutical IP to make drugs accessible to everyone and save taxpayers trillions?
ScrambledEggs@lazysoci.al 11 months ago
Lol we all know trump would put pharmaceuticals on the exemption list.
conditional_soup@lemm.ee 11 months ago
This is why it’s a mixed bag for me. IP law is kinda important in a capitalist system; if someone comes up with a wonder drug that outright cures addiction or something, you’d want that person to be able to recoup their costs before a bigger organization with more capital swoops in and undercuts them on production costs until they’re the sole supplier of the drug. The hepatitis C cure drug selling for $70,000 is a great example of this quandary; there’s millions of dollars worth of research and clinical trials that went into developing the drug, you’d want the company to be able to recuperate the costs of developing it or else there’s less incentive to do something similar for other diseases down the line. Also, though, $70,000 or go fucking die is an outrageous statement.
Of course, what we have for IP law in practice is a bastardized monster, where corporations exploit the fuck out of it to have monopoly control over important products like insulins and life-saving medications that cost cents to produce and allow them to sell for hundreds a dose. That’s not the intent of IP law, IMO, and that doesn’t really serve anyone.
Avatar_of_Self@lemmy.world 11 months ago
In the US the tax payer subsidizes almost all drug research. Between 2010 and 2019 the NIH spend $184 Billion on all but 2 drugs approved by the FDA.
It worked out to about $1.5 Billion for each R&D product with a novel target and about $600 mill for each R&D product with multiple targets.
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10148199/
Or
jamanetwork.com/journals/…/2804378
I’m not sure how much is subsidized outside of NIH but I’d imagine other countries are doing the same.
Why should companies own the whole IP?
Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
The problem I mostly have is even when those costs are recouped most companies fight tooth and nail to keep the prices high and unaffordable in order to line the pockets of investors.
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
The development of new medications should be 100% funded by governments and the IP that comes out of it should be 100% if the government, aka the people.
Governments are the ones that do the investments of projects that don’t directly make money but are good for humanity.
You don’t like that and the hepac drug can suddenly cost 70 dollars
zeezee@slrpnk.net 11 months ago
idk i think our incentive should be to cure diseases with public funding and make people healthy instead of for profit but what do i know
libra00@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I see the point you’re aiming at, but it’s not little companies discovering new drugs it’s giant corporations (often on the back of government research money) who then ‘swoop in’ to protect their own profits while people in underdeveloped nations die of tuberculosis or whatever because they would rather make money than save lives.
el_muerte@lemm.ee 11 months ago
“Noooo, not like that!”
Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org 11 months ago
Isn’t Hollywood going to unleash armies of lawyers on them?
anindefinitearticle@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
[deleted]Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org 11 months ago
Tech companies have more
I really really want them to prove that
JeSuisUnHombre@lemm.ee 11 months ago
I would love those 2 to have the most expensive trial in history
9tr6gyp3@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Do it.
sparky@lemmy.federate.cc 11 months ago
So basically the bluesky source code is now public domain?
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
That’s what would happen if copyright doesn’t exist. If a company releases something, it’s immediately public domain, because no law protects it.
GPL
The GPL is very much not the public domain.
merc@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
The GPL is basically trying to make a world without copyright. The GPL basically only has teeth in a world where copyright exists. If copyright didn’t exist then everything would be in the public domain and the GPL would be toothless, but that’s fine because it would no longer be unnecessary.
bilb@lem.monster 11 months ago
Itsan interesting point that without any IP law, GPL would be invalid and corporations could use and modify things like Lemmy without complying with the license.
primemagnus@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
“I don’t think so. Whatever is yours is ours, whatever is ours stays ours. Thank you for understanding.”
—Microsoft et al.
resipsaloquitur@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Nonono, see, they will have punitive contracts with employees that will nail them to the wall if they leak source code.
They like rules as long as they’re the one writing them.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
That’s probably better than what we have now, but still very short of ideal. Here’s my proposition:
That would solve most of the problems while keeping the vast majority of the benefits.
merc@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
I see the value in trademarks because it prevents people from selling knock-offs. In some cases (medicine, machine tools) using a knock-off could be deadly.
For patents, I don’t think it should be one-size-fits-all. A modern drug takes a lot longer to develop than some e-commerce thing like one-click ordering. Different categories of thing could get different lengths of patent protection. Also, IMO, the clock should start once something is available in the market. Again, I’m thinking of medicine. Something might be working in the lab so it’s patented, but going from lab to store shelves is not quick. If the clock starts immediately, then that mostly benefits huge and rich pharma companies that can move extremely quickly.
I strongly believe that if we have copyrights, they should be short with an optional renewal that’s also short. Too much of our culture is locked up by companies like Disney. They shouldn’t be able to hold onto it for more than a century. That’s absurd. For the most part, media makes the vast majority of its money in months. 14 years gives the creator not only the most lucrative period, but also the vast majority of the tail of the distribution. It would also be good if corporate-owned copyright had a much shorter term than copyrights owned by individuals. And, we also need to have a way for people to get their own creations back, by say cancelling the copyright assignment.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Sure, that’s what the one-time extension is for.
The way they use patents, however, is completely abusive. In general:
Patents last 20-25 years, which is just ridiculous for pretty much anything. Here’s how I envision the process for medicines:
For something like a phone:
Agreed, as well as with your point about corporations. I used 14 because it has precedent, but honestly 10 years is more reasonable. It needs to be long enough that a work that didn’t get mainstream attention in the first few years but gets it later doesn’t get sucked up by a competitor, but short enough that it’s still relevant culturally when it expires.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
I would still keep patents at about 20 years. There’s some nuance that needs to change to prevent, say, Nintendo from retroactively patenting Pokemon after Palworld comes out, but yeah patent law needs a colonic.
I’d be okay with 20 or even 30 year copyright terms on complete works, but I would be more open on derivative works and fair use.
I want stricter trademark law. Trademark should be about knowing where your products come from. A manufacturer gets right of way over a mark so that they can defend their own reputation, and I’ll help them defend that mark because I want to know where the goods I buy come from.
It should not be legal to buy a commodity item and slap your brand on it. I see this a lot in the tool market. There seems to be two 6" jointers in production in the world today, the one JET makes, and the one everyone else sells. Wen, Craftsman and Porter Cable among many others sell the same 6" jointer. Speaking of Craftsman, that brand is now owned by Stanley Black & Decker, who also owns Porter Cable, DeWalt, and several others. Most of what they use this for is to sell mutually incompatible yet functionally similar power tools so you have to buy more batteries. They might design or build some of their tools in-house, but many of them they buy from some other company and just put their stickers on. Is it, or is it not, a “Craftsman”?
Then you’ve got Amazon, Temu, AliExpress and other Chinese dropshipping platforms. They make a whole bunch of shit and then register nineteen or twenty bullshit trademarks to sell the same thing under. I would make that illegal; if you have a brand that is suitable for selling a given item, you’re not allowed another for that purpose. Trademarks are supposed to reduce consumer confusion, you’re using them to increase consumer confusion. If I am elected dictator, that kind of behavior will earn you a public trepanning.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
I disagree. However, I do think you should be obligated to disclose the source of that commodity so customers can use reviews of similar products to get an idea of the quality of yours. You’re still on the hook for warranties and whatnot, but you should need to disclose what you did and didn’t design/build.
This goes doubly for where something was made. You can’t just slap a “Made in USA” sticker on something that’s made elsewhere, you need to disclose where things come from. Such as, “Designed in USA, parts made in Vietnam, assembled in Mexico” or whatever.
Would this apply to product segmentation? For example, Toyota owns the Lexus brand, and they segment their products under those different brands. They reuse a ton of parts though, so your Toyota is much more similar to a Lexus than it is to other economy vehicles in its market segment.
Walking that line is quite difficult, and I think it largely misses the point. I’m not confused when I buy a ATHEOTS or whatever BS brand they come up, I know I’m buying cheap knock-off stuff. The problem here is how quickly those brands pop up and disappear, and that should be illegal IMO (you can’t just rebrand when your company gets a bad reputation). But maybe that was your point, I’m just saying it’s less a trademark issue and more company restructuring shenanigans.
To tackle this problem, I’m happy to remove limited liability protections once a company gets above a certain size. But that’s a bit outside the scope of the IP law discussion.
4am@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Also, patents shouldn’t be filable once prior art exists.
Aka Nintendo patenting game mechanics 30 years after the fact to try and sue Palworld.
Also game mechanics and UI features being tied to existing functionality (Amazon’s “one click”, Apple’s “swipe to unlock”) should not be considered novel.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
That’s the case today, it’s just that the patent office accepts far more patents than it should. Those patents absolutely don’t hold up in court, but it really shouldn’t get to that point either.
Unmapped@lemmy.ml 11 months ago
This is the way.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 11 months ago
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
It’s old-school liberal, as in closer to libertarian. Trump courted libertarians, and he claims to be wanting to legitimately downsize things.
Here’s a rough history of Copyright law in the US:
So it’s pretty easy to see that both major parties support copyright extension.
I doubt he’ll do it, but I could see him doing it just to “own the libs” since Clinton was the last to sign a copyright extension.