> I can charge people money for using the number 65234563124 because I'm the first to file a patent for it?

Absolutely.

Creative works are files in a computer, data. All data is information. All information is sequences of bits. All sequences of bits are numbers.

I can even calculate how big those numbers are given their bit count.

  digits(bits) = ceil(bits * log10(2))

  digits(32)     = 10
  digits(64)     = 20
  digits(128)    = 39
  digits(256)    = 78
  digits(512)    = 155
  digits(1024)   = 309

  digits(20 KiB) = 49,321
  digits(2 GiB)  = 5,171,655,946

Intellectual property, copyright especially, is logically reducible to ownership of numbers. Humans are interesting number generators.

That's how absurd this system is.

▲ fragmede 16 hours ago | parent [-]

Fortunately, the laws are (currently) implemented by humans, not robots. Patents aren't copyrights aren't trademarks. Copyright isn't a perfect system, but it's the system we have to promote the creation of creative works. It's been perverted by corporate interests, but it has seemed to serve us well enough over the past 250 years. Simplifying it to owning a number is an oversimplification that loses too much resolution because the numbers aren't short ones, they're because computers work on numbers, so the story of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone on a computer boils down to a number to a computer. But it's more than just a number. It's a book with meaning and words, and so logic wants us to reduce it to call it ownership of numbers, but humanly speaking, if JK Rowling wrote a book and it was popular, it doesn't seem absurd for her to get rich off of it.

Patents, unless it's for something truly exceptional, just seem like a good system for getting lawyers rich.

Trademarks I believe in though. If I buy a Caterpillar bulldozer, I should be able to believe that I'm getting a genuine Caterpillar bulldozer, and no one else is allowed to use the name.

Our systems of intellectual properties have been abused, so it's fun to think about culture shifting to one of intellectual property nihilism, but I don't see that happening in my lifetime.

▲

matheusmoreira 15 hours ago | parent [-]

I have the opposite opinion. Patents are tolerable, while copyright is so intolerable that copyright infringement becomes civil disobedience and arguably a moral imperative.

Tolerability is a function of how long the monopoly lasts. The social contract was we'd all pretend we couldn't trivially copy works for some years so that creators could make their well deserved profit, and then the works would enter the public domain. When's the last time you saw your culture enter the public domain? JK Rowling has made her fortunes several times over, yet you and I will be dead for around a century before those works become public.

Nearly two hundred years ago, one man warned everyone this would happen.

https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyr...

> At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side.

> Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men.

> Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end.

> Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly.

> Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law.

> Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot

> once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions.

> The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create.

> in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living.

Did people listen? No. They doubled down on functionally infinite copyrights. If lasts even longer now. These are merely the results.

	▲	fragmede 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah I don't think copyright should last longer than a couple of years, but I'm not in charge of anything. I had this idea of copythrough, where a draconian dystopian sci-fi monitoring system existed where TVs knew who was watching, and creatives got paid out by the number of eyeballs per minute. Couldn't decide where to take the story though.