| Property rights are not the only way to create profit. That's a very capitalistic mindset. Plenty of societies have functioned adequately without our current form of property rights, either physical or intellectual. Before AI, it was the internet that really challenged intellectual property rights. When information flows freely, what happens? Example: many musicians make their pay by performing live, not from royalties on the properties they sold to producing companies. Intellectual property rights rewards the first-comers, not the innovators. For example, you give a drug researcher a patent on their discovery, that discourages innovation on making that new drug cheap and readily available. The same can be said about AI models: the heavy investments by OpenAI and Anthropic to make these frontier models forces them to charge pretty expensive prices, but if we only had them, we would not have much innovation in making fast tiny models that are more cost and energy efficient. That drive comes from China because they are resource constrained and price-conscious. |
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| ▲ | Foreskin_Mafia 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is some New Zealand-level of alternative facts. "Plenty of societies have functioned adequately without our current form of property rights" Adequately? name one lol "many musicians make their pay by performing live" ticketmaster "innovation on making that new drug cheap and readily available" that's not what innovation is. "China because they are resource constrained and price-conscious" you need to go outside | | |
| ▲ | true_religion an hour ago | parent [-] | | Namely... every society in existence before the year 1496. Our current form of property rights includes copyright, which had no formal treatment until the city of Venice issued a decree that fined anyone who printed an author's work without direct permission. Previous to that, the effort of copying a book was seen as so high, that one deserved reward simply for doing that. In fact, there were times that copying books was seen as social charity, that needed to be encouraged. |
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| ▲ | HeWhoLurksLate 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | in engineering software land, FreeCAD exists, yet Fusion, Catia, OnShape, Creo, SolidWorks, NX, and many other paid Computer Aided Design and Computer Aided Engineering softwares exist and have features and use-cases that FreeCAD simply does not have. In this scenario, how do you square taking the risk and time required to develop something good with the hopeful payoff for creating something? I guess some of the major value in those closed softwares is enterprise support and that could still be feasible, but still, the question stands - if what is currently software piracy becomes legal, how do the people who commit a portion of their lives to improving whatever it is they're working on get compensated? I regularly contribute to FOSS, but I am in quite a privileged position to do so, because I have time to do so after putting food on the table. I hope this comes off in good faith, I'm genuinely curious | |
| ▲ | piker 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The parent was responding to this diabolically uninformed quote from the GP: “You want a new Christoper Nolan film on his new idea, invest in it. That investment is a risk. Once made the money is made people can copy and distribute however they like.” It’s hard to have “invest” in a sentence without a capitalist structure unless GP somehow meant invest their personal time or barter or something. | | |
| ▲ | foota 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think they meant more like "people band together to pay Christophe Nolan to create some new film" ala crowdfunding. Is that a sustainable model for the world economy? Unclear. | | |
| ▲ | thereisnospork an hour ago | parent [-] | | Well if we got enough people together it would be pretty cheap, maybe 15 or 20 bucks or so with inflation. And we could fill the movie upfront, and create some previews and launch an advertising campaign -- that'd certainly help drum up interest and get more people to crowdfund. Best even to just collect their money as right before they watch it so they know they aren't getting scammed and will in fact get to watch the movie they are crowdfunding. We can also crowdfund some popcorn machines and communal viewing rooms, after all people will want to have a snack and watch their crowdfunded movie with friends and family. | | |
| ▲ | foota an hour ago | parent [-] | | That was a lot of snark :-) I know what you're saying. It's not clear to what degree the film industry would be viable in its current form though without IP rights. If everyone can watch the latest marvel film at home for free, are they going to be willing to pay to see it in theaters? There would likely still be some demand for the experience, but the tickets would need to be more expensive to recoup the costs of making the film. At that point: it does seem like people pooling together their funds to fund the movie itself isn't insane. The point is that the "investors" wouldn't be investing in the hopes of a financial return, they'd be paying for the creation of the film. |
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| ▲ | ericmay an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > For example, you give a drug researcher a patent on their discovery, that discourages innovation on making that new drug cheap and readily available. The pharmaceutical industry is also very highly regulated and so without some protection of profit you actually are likely to end up in a situation in which innovation doesn’t occur because it costs a lot of money to build new pharmaceutical products and if you build them and someone can just reverse engineer it and sell it cheaply you’ve switched your competition model from rewarding the development, however imperfect, of new drugs to rewarding a race to the bottom on cost and increasingly thin supply chains propped up by cost-cutting measures. With more regulations you probably need stronger IP protections as well. > Property rights are not the only way to create profit. That's a very capitalistic mindset. Plenty of societies have functioned adequately without our current form of property rights, either physical or intellectual. Well it’s good to have a capitalistic mindset since so far that has been without a doubt the best economic model that has worked for humankind, even including the negative repercussions, but you shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water when it comes to IP. It’s a bit like “free” trade - if the US was, for example, completely open with IP and China isn’t they simply take your IP, build cheaper products, and then funnel profits into IP protected drugs. It’s a lose-lose. Don’t let communists and other such authoritarians confuse you about how the world actually works. We can also reform some IP for certain industries. When it comes to trade secrets maybe we protect those. Internet content? Who cares? It’s almost universally useless and not economically valuable so there isn’t any need to solve the problem of capturing monetary value. One of the best potential effects of AI would be that it could wipe out all of these useless content creators and pundits leaving only the good stuff left (established institutions like the NYT and truly great content creators - Khan Academy for ex). | |
| ▲ | lobf an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | >For example, you give a drug researcher a patent on their discovery, that discourages innovation on making that new drug cheap and readily available Which is why there is famously no market or money to be made on generic medicine. |
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