Stealing IP is how American industry got started. Goose: gander, pot: kettle.

It is what built and sustains the movie and music industries. See: work for hire and 100+year copyright length

The tech industry: see: copyright and patent assignment from discoverer to corporation.

I know that corporations forcing me to assign patents and copyright to them was an incentive to take published works from "software practice and experience" and other technical journals, use them as the core of my work, and disclose that source to the company I worked for. Didn't stop them from applying for patents, however.

I think the discussion of copyright needs more refinement. We need to separate the discoverer's need for acknowledgment of development effort from the rent-seeking core of copyright.

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ux266478 3 days ago | parent [-]

The things you listed are very far downstream of the start of American industry, which is in primary resource extraction and processing. Which is you know, what actually built the country. The media industry has always been materially irrelevant, and what we think of as the tech industry is extremely new.

You're right to call out the nasty environment surrounding intellectual property in the US and the exploitation of ideation in general, you just needed a correction on that. Someone else in this chain said virtually the same thing, which is a weird coincidence of historical ignorance. Not too weird, people tend to forget the 18th and 19th centuries happened, and much of the causally important wheels of the world are in the unsexy grease pits nobody wants to think about.

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rickydroll 3 days ago | parent [-]

You're right, I didn't include stuff at the beginning, for example, the theft of IP in textile manufacturing in the late 1700s. The US government didn't recognize copyrights on foreign literature which let US publishers reprint things such as Gilbert, Sullivan's operettas and Dickens novels

Then there is Alexander Hamilton's advocacy for importing foreign technicians that bring back IP and reproduce it here in the states. Best of all was the patent act of 1793 which like with the literature copyright ignoring, let us citizens patent inventions from the other side of the pond.

The founding fathers definitely had the right idea on IP.

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ux266478 3 days ago | parent [-]

Which is to say they didn't have much of an idea at all, because it really didn't exist in much the same way. In fact, this is still a inaccurate characterization for exactly that reason. On the basis of copyright, take for instance the idea of exclusive rights to print a work. This actually wasn't implemented as a method of protection for the author, but a political reaction to the printing press being "misused" in the eyes of the anglo-colonialist entity controlling the British isles, and so was a means of preventing the mass creation of undesirable literature.

On the basis of patents, it didn't quite have nearly as much of a history of mutation culturally, but did experience massive whiplash in purpose and application following the implementation of globalism. What was once a system to protect technical innovation on an individual level, would find new purpose as a means to provide structure to an increasingly complicated and internationalized dynamic market. Another means of bureaucratic organization. Then, once again, the context and purpose would change when the world developed digital globalism. The entire engine of IP as a legal fiction became a significant geopolitical tool in an increasingly cramped and fragile world, a necessary gimmick holding up the sky.

Unfortunately, not much to do at this point. It'll likely only become even more nonsensically important as time wears on, until the globalist system collapses. It's certainly possible it'll even be the confounding factor that causes the great unraveling, though the problems hardly begin and end with IP. It was just a useful legal fiction in the wrong place at the wrong time.

	▲	rickydroll 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I guess I should thank you for adding yet another load of deeper reading into American history. :)