Patent, trademark, copyright, etc are all supposed to benefit society as a whole. The point isn't that corporations get to lock things away forever. The goal is to incentivize innovation, both technological and cultural. The more companies make the argument that 'thing x from a long time ago is crucial to us now' the more I think that our current IP laws are actually slowing down innovation instead of incentivizing it. Maybe we need a new system that starts costing money after a point to maintain IP rights. That system would recognize the value taken by private companies holding on to old IP to the detriment of society and force them to come up with new things to justify their existence instead of living off of that one thing they did right 100 years ago.

(Repeating for n-th time:) I like the idea of exponential cost of IP protection.

First 10 or so years the protection is free. Then, on the first year of paid protection, you pay $10. On the second, $20. On the tenth, $10,240. On the sixteenth, $655,360. The year you miss a payment the protection ceases.

If your IP is immensely valuable and is bringing you gobs of money, you can continue paying and keep your monopoly. But the case of keeping reams of stuff under the lock "just in case" would be largely eliminated. Anything that's not a cash cow currently being milked and paid for would get released to the public domain.

On top of that, the federal budget would receive some extra money, but only from those who is making money, and not the small guy who just has published an indie game on Steam.

Ip rights should just end after a relatively quick slice of time. You made your money off it, now it’s time to pass it on to the public. A payment model just ensures the only entities who can hold ip long term are corporations.

I see this sentiment frequently, but I think it is missing some of the crucial details:

- patents last for 20 years in the us

- trademarks do not have value to the rest of the world. Eg, the name “Kleenex” is (was?) a granted trademark, to help customers identify products from that specific company. “Kleenex” has somewhat become generic, but I don’t think this is really better or worse for humanity in general — it just removes some branding strength from Kleenex.

- copyright lasts life of author +70 years. This is problematic imo.

I think the concern about copyright is justified, but I think the others are honestly pretty decent. But of course different people will have different opinions.

Assumption 1: Commercialization and incentivization(beyond what is already achievable in our market system) of the production of media goods are a good thing and we would be poorer culturally-wise.

Assumption 2: Without IP laws, people would not produce works(aside from credits and attribution). Engineers will stop engineering. Lawyers will stop writing opinions. Scientists won't write research papers.

Assumption 3: IP laws did work to incentivize production and technological advancement, and they are only or the primary means to do so. We just need to reign in the excess.

Assumption 4: People who created useful works for its own sake are not valuable(open source software/hardware, inventors inventing things and freely publishing information, etc). Patents and copyright laws should favors the people who use copyright and patents over them, and the profit motive should reign supreme.

In a free market of ideas, copyright would have perished long ago.

As a teenager of the 90s I have, correctly or incorrectly, been indoctrinated with the notion that RIAA/MPAA have too much clout for their own good. Sweden (Pirate Bay) and New Zealand (Kim.Com) taught us that.

But it’s not just The US — the bulk of my record collection is still digitised as Ogg/Vorbis in protest of Fraunhofer’s hold on MP3 as a non-public format.

Was I brainwashed? Did the kids of yesteryear lose in the long run? Aside from nostalgia, it’s worth remembering the history of this battle to learn for the future.

I like that your solution to corporations locking things away forever is a new system that would immediately excludes individual citizens and ties the capability to remove a cultural good from the public to wealth.

The main problems with current copyright laws, I think, is the creators need to sell their right to one of a handful of powerful corporations to make money at all, then those corporations grip on their rights and monopolize it, even if it means something isn't available at all. A better idea would be author's rights that can't be sold, and licensing that can't be denied. That way there still is monetary incentives to create, but cultural goods remain available to the public.

Why do you think that? Can you point to some early philosopher of law that made such utilitarian arguments?

half of your sp500-based-retirement is munching off ancient standards patents in media/tech/health. the rest is split between selling you disposable devices and sugar water.

... so in a way it does benefit society. but it's the society that likes to steal from social security and then call it a scam.