In an economy where ideas have value, it seems logical we should have property protection, much like we do for physical goods. Its easy to argue "ideas should be freely shared", but if an idea takes 20 years and $100M dollars to develop, and there are no protections for ideas, then no one will take the time to develop them. Most modern technology we have is due to copyright/patents (drugs, electronics, entertainment, etc.), because without those protections, no one would have invested the time and energy to develop them in the first place.

I believe you are probably only looking at the current state of the world and seeing how it "stifles competition" or "hampers innovation". Those allegations are probably true to some extent, especially in specific cases, but its also missing the fact that without those protections, the tech likely wouldn't be created in the first place (and so you still wouldn't be able to freely use the idea, since the person who invented it wouldn't have).

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8note 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> drugs

this is a kinda strange example, since the discovery tends to be government funded research, and the safety shown by private money

the USSR went to space without those protections. its not like property protections are the only thing that has driven invention.

MIT licenses are also pretty popular as are creative commons licenses.

people also do things that don't make a lot of money, like teaching elementary school. it costs a ton of money to make and run all those schools, but without any intellectual property being created that can be sold or rented out.

i dont believe that nobody would want to build much of the things we have now, if there wasnt IP around them. Making and inventing things is fun

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bhelkey 3 days ago | parent [-]

> i dont believe that nobody would want to build much of the things we have now, if there wasnt IP around them. Making and inventing things is fun

People write fanfiction without being paid, however, Avatar 2 cost hundreds of millions to produce [1]. The studio didn't spend this money for the heck of it, they spent this money with the hope of recouping their investment.

If no one can make money off of intellectual property, people will continue writing fanfiction. But why would a studio spend hundreds of millions making a blockbuster movie?

[1] https://variety.com/2022/film/news/avatar-2-budget-expensive...

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laggyluke 3 days ago | parent [-]

> The studio didn't spend this money for the heck of it, they spent this money with the hope of recouping their investment.

I wonder if the world would be a better place if we had fewer financial incentives to do things, in general?

> But why would a studio spend hundreds of millions making a blockbuster movie?

Under this hypothetical scenario, I believe there wouldn't be a "studio" in the first place. There could be a group of people who want to express themselves, get famous or do something just for fun, without any direct financial gain. Sure, they wouldn't be able to pull off Avatar 2, but our expectations as consumers would also be different.

	▲	card_zero 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I note that production, or developing an idea, is not the same as having the idea. You can't deliberately have an idea by spending money, or have a better idea by spending more money. You can employ people to look at a problem and expect some of them to have reasonably good ideas about it - people who were selected because they already have good ideas in that general area. Then you say "these ideas cost this much money to come up with," as if you made ideas happen by decree. That's not what you did, those ideas were latent. What you did was to get them organized. The opposite idea is intrinsic motivation, and that artists make art because they love it, and they were going to make the art (or come up with ideas) anyway, even if you didn't pay them. But artists also love having comfortable lifestyles, maybe families, maybe expensive studio equipment, maybe parties. And although you can't force them to care about your project you can certainly bribe them into seeing if they are interested. So you can bring out the ideas that they were supposedly going to have anyway - but might not have been able to have without funding - and you can steer the emphasis of their pre-existing interests around. Which is to say that creativity and money interact in a weird way, where ideas don't have a cost, but creative focus does.

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Permit 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> but if an idea takes 20 years and $100M dollars to develop, and there are no protections for ideas, then no one will take the time to develop them

This sounds trivially true but I have some trouble reconciling it with reality. For example the Llama models probably cost more than this to develop but are made freely available on GitHub. So while it’s true that some things won’t be built, I think it’s also the case that many things would still be built.

	▲	xvector 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		The Llama models will likely be close sourced if they ever outperform.

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tolerance 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I appreciate you giving the parent comment a fair chance.

As a society we’re having trouble defining abstract components of the self (consciousness, intelligence, identity) as is. What makes the legislative notion of an idea and its reification (what’s actually protected under copyright laws) secure from this same scrutiny? Then patent rights. And what do you think may happen if the viability of said economy comes into question afterwards?