| ▲ | kiba a day ago |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | BriggyDwiggs42 a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| Is this meant to be a rewording of the parent comment as a critique, or is it meant to be an expression of your views? I’d probably contest assumptions 3 and 4, but I’m not sure if you yourself even support them. |
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| ▲ | kiba a day ago | parent [-] | | How about both? You are welcome to critique my opinion. As for assumption 3, there's SpaceX. They don't open their design of their rockets to the public where their competitors, such as the Chinese can copy them. Neither the US government nor SpaceX wants that. So there's a large amount of innovations, probably countless designs that went into these rockets. Maybe in a better geopolitical situation, patents would be respected, but why would SpaceX gives everyone the blueprint to catch up? Patents make more sense if designs are easily reverse engineered and you still want a monopoly to make back your investment. That is clearly false as people have made innovation in 3D printing where new designs are standardized for the benefit of the whole market. Assumption 4 is the defacto state of things even if it were not the intention. People who invent useful things for the sake of useful things are clearly at a disadvantage against corporations or entities who have more money to hire lawyers. There's already at least one case of a trivial patent for 3D printing stronger layers that expired being repatented again by another company, increasing legal uncertainty from implementing the technique in slicers and other software. Most slicer these days are open source, generally don't make money for its developers(at least not directly), but they do grow the 3D printing market through its active development. The slicers also happen to share code, unsurprising given that they are forks of one another. Clearly, this model is incompatible with the patent system as it stands. | | |
| ▲ | tastyfreeze a day ago | parent [-] | | On the SpaceX example, they couldn't release their designs even if they wanted to. ITAR prohibits it. If they weren't prohibited from sharing rocket technology SpaceX might share. Tesla patents are open. I don't see why Musk wouldn't do the same for SpaceX if the government allowed it. | | |
| ▲ | kiba a day ago | parent [-] | | I don't see Musk doing that as he directly stated it himself. As for Tesla patents, I would speculate that it's more about companies not willing copy Tesla which is why Telsa doesn't really care if they open source the information. Copying isn't always so easy especially if there are structural issues involved. Recall the superchargers that became standard. Other companies were using a different connector, but the supercharger connector was obviously superior and they relented after many years. Patents are more useful in situation in which your designs are easily reverse engineered and there's little barrier in copying. In any case, there are firms in the automative industry that specialized in doing the teardown of cars and doing cost estimation. Such a firm would tell their competitors how Tesla actually make their cars, so there's not much value in publishing their patents anyway, other than PR stunts. Patents are not as useful in scenarios in which trade secrets provide a strong and durable barrier to entry. They also require lawsuits to enforce, which is rather costly and imposes cost on our economy, so there's inefficiency to consider as well. Theoretically, a monopoly in this instance would incentivize R&D effort but we know that monopolies has various nasty side effects and not everybody have money to hire lawyers and enforce them. |
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| ▲ | nox101 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There's lots mixed up with IP laws. Are talking inventions (patents) or works of art (books, movies, music, games) I certainly know that most games and movies wouldn't exist without a monetary incentive. They take too much work to make. There are exceptions. You can make pong in a few hours and you can shoot a movie of yourself talking. You can also do both as a hobby a few hours a night. But, most movies require sets, costumes, props, and lots of other equipment and labor. Most games also require many person years of work. It's unlikely people would put in that much work if they couldn't make a living from it as it allows them to do it full time so they actually have the time needed. OTOH, music "can" take a few hours and so could be done more easily as a hobby so while not all forms of music would continue I suspect we'd still get tons of it with without monetary incentives.. Books, it depends on the type of book. People write blogs for free and compile them into a book. |
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| ▲ | heysammy a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| How could we have gotten great works like Canterbury Tales or Beowulf without rent-seeking copyright protectionism? |
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| ▲ | nickff a day ago | parent [-] | | I am not a die-hard supporter of IP protection laws, but your examples are classic survivorship bias, as well as falling victim to the broken windows fallacy. | | |
| ▲ | kiba a day ago | parent [-] | | It is not a given that we should incentivize the production of cultural good beyond of what is already achievable. I should note that there is already strong intrinsic motivation to create and there are already too many works to read, watch, or listen, and a lot of slops created clearly to make money. People are willing to accept deplorable working conditions to pursue their dreams, such as developing video games. Since I do improv, most of the value I created are on the spot and ephemeral anyway and I basically perform for free anyway. I would stand to gain if people go out to theaters and other avenue as opposed to consuming content on netflix. |
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| ▲ | jmward01 a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I mostly agree that there are assumptions built into IP law that may not be true. Are there good examples of history where a society that didn't have some similar system out-innovated one that did? Are there good parallels today? |
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| ▲ | zjuventus14 a day ago | parent [-] | | Highly recommend the book “Against Intellectual Monopoly” which argues against IP law with a lot of historical references. One such example is paint & coloring in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From the book - “In 1862, British firms controlled about 50 percent of the world market and French firms another 40 percent, with Swiss and German companies as marginal players. By 1873, German companies had 50 percent of the market, while French, Swiss, and British firms controlled between 13 percent and 17 percent each. In 1913, German firms had a market share of more than 80 percent, the Swiss had about 8 percent, and the rest of the world had disappeared.” Switzerland at the time had no patent protection, and Germany allowed processes to be patented in 1877 but not products themselves. Parallels are harder to find today due to the expansion of IP law as a condition of trade with many developed nations, but the book does have some more recent examples. |
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