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There Are No Good Arguments for Intellectual Property (2010)

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Re: There Are No Good Arguments for Intellectual Property (2010)

#61

Post by saithound »

slver wrote: post #45
jayd16 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you fail to understand is that investment in IP is not the goal, so saying it would no longer be invested in is non-convincing. You have to actually prove that research would slow down but your hypothetical scenarios are not proof. I can just as easily assert that investment and research would happen with or without temporary exclusive legal rights as. Market forces still push for improvement even without exclus…

Research the origins of IP. IP didn't exist forever. It was introduced because it was needed. If you think this is subjective, let me ask you think: you have a popular YouTube channel, your content requires paying writers, actors, VFX teams and editors. Bunch of other people copy your content freely and legally and get most of the ad revenue. You protest: you made this content, you paid for it. Please just link to me…

Your hypothetical scenario is silly: it relies on the dubious assumption that neither YouTube nor the viewers have any agency about who they give money to. The agency of the viewers was discussed in the other responses, so let's focus on the agency of YouTube.

Why would YouTube pay ad revenue to a "bunch of other people" in a hypothetical world where YouTube could freely and legally host a copy of the content themselves, and take all the ad revenue for themselves?

They have an incentive to pay something the creator (if they think that doing so would motivate them to create more content, and hence lead to more ad revenue in the future), but certainly not to a bunch of random people uploading the same content.

Re: There Are No Good Arguments for Intellectual Property (2010)

#62

Post by slver »

saithound wrote: post #61
slver wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Research the origins of IP. IP didn't exist forever. It was introduced because it was needed. If you think this is subjective, let me ask you think: you have a popular YouTube channel, your content requires paying writers, actors, VFX teams and editors. Bunch of other people copy your content freely and legally and get most of the ad revenue. You protest: you made this content, you paid for it. Please just link to me…

Your hypothetical scenario is silly: it relies on the dubious assumption that neither YouTube nor the viewers have any agency about who they give money to. The agency of the viewers was discussed in the other responses, so let's focus on the agency of YouTube. Why would YouTube pay ad revenue to a "bunch of other people" in a hypothetical world where YouTube could freely and legally host a copy of the content themsel…

Your argument in favor of YouTube protecting IP rights basically applies 1:1 about the government protecting it.

You do realize if YouTube alone protected copyright, we'd have a NotYouTube clone setup within minutes where the copies and ads will go to, or not?

We have governments for this stuff, so we don't have to play whack-a-mole with copycats all over the internet and the world.

Re: There Are No Good Arguments for Intellectual Property (2010)

#63

Post by slver »

cturner wrote: post #57
slver wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

?

Once you have eaten an apple, it cannot be eaten again. If you plant a crop of wheat on your field this season, your brother cannot also plant a crop of barley there. When you ride your bicycle to work for the day, your neighbour cannot ride the same bicycle to the gym at midday. The quality of scarceness does not come from law, it is inherent. Through owning your house, you get to decide what goes on there and have…

It's full of empty houses and free land over the entire country.

If I live alone in a big house with 5 rooms, I could host at least 10-15 people there. They would surely rather live in that nice house, and not on the street.

What causes that scarcity that I live alone in a big house, while homeless people roam the streets? Property rights.

Property rights cause scarcity way before "natural scarcity" kicks in. To think otherwise is to lie to yourself.

The reason we can't rely just on natural scarcity is because it reduces us to living like animals. Rights protection, in balance, is what allows society to rise above a pile of people consuming everything to scarcity and filling everything to capacity, with no ability to take a long-term view other mere existence.

Re: There Are No Good Arguments for Intellectual Property (2010)

#64

Post by lordnacho »

slver wrote: post #31

Nobody would invest billions in IP if someone from the street can walk by and take it.Is that such a complex subject to understand? IP is not a different concept than property. People like to say "you can't actually steal IP, you get to keep yours". Of course you can steal IP, by using it or redistributing it without compensating the creator, you reduce the value of their IP. You stole from them by taking part of the…

That's only one side of the story. The other side is someone gets a patent, doesn't build a thing that people can buy, and just tries to get money off someone who does want to do that.

People who are looking at making this thing then get scared of investing in the development of the product and then we're back to no investment.

I've literally seen this with my own eyes. A friend of mine is one of these guys who has a 3D printer and thinks about what to invent all day. He also spends a lot of time looking up patents and tosses out ideas that he thinks will cause a legal mess. It's a shame because I think we might be at a point where we need more people executing than dreaming up ideas.

Re: There Are No Good Arguments for Intellectual Property (2010)

#65

Post by imtringued »

There is a certain amount of demand for intellectual property, it clearly has a reason to exist. The problem is that it is completely inflexible. There are entities that "need" 100 years of copyright, but the vast majority don't.

The government is forcing a one size fits all solution designed for special interests at the expense of the majority. That's where the problem lies.

Re: There Are No Good Arguments for Intellectual Property (2010)

#66

Post by chayleaf »

aaron695 wrote: post #26

There's zero substance to this is quick blog. > artworks and medicine have been produced for ages without IP law; This is bullshit. What are they even talking about? I think medicine and movies/art and IP were invented around the same time. Last 100 may be 200 years years. In our 100,000 year history that links them pretty well. Wikipedia - "The modern concept of intellectual property developed in England in the 17th…

It's hard to distinguish correlation from causation. If a country imports more IP than it exports, then enforcing IP laws quite clearly bleeds money from it. If citizens spend money on local non-IP industries instead of foreign IPs, the country has more money. But if the local IP industry is strong enough, it can bring money from other countries, and local IP enforcement can help support the industry that brings potential foreign money inflow. That is, assuming IP "enforcement" increases money spent on IP, which isn't always the case.

Re: There Are No Good Arguments for Intellectual Property (2010)

#67

Post by samatman »

neonological wrote: post #38
moonchild wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In a patent regime, a company can (indeed must) publish their process Must they? From what I have heard, a number of technologies have not been patented, simply because the potential liability from keeping it as a trade secret was less than the liability of the process being made public

What the OP said is completely incorrect. No idea or process must be published. You have the right to keep any idea a secret. However to patent the idea you must publish it.

What I said is completely correct, if you read the entire sentence: to obtain an exclusive monopoly, you must patent, which requires publication.

Re: There Are No Good Arguments for Intellectual Property (2010)

#68

Post by cturner »

slver wrote: post #63
cturner wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you have eaten an apple, it cannot be eaten again. If you plant a crop of wheat on your field this season, your brother cannot also plant a crop of barley there. When you ride your bicycle to work for the day, your neighbour cannot ride the same bicycle to the gym at midday. The quality of scarceness does not come from law, it is inherent. Through owning your house, you get to decide what goes on there and have…

It's full of empty houses and free land over the entire country. If I live alone in a big house with 5 rooms, I could host at least 10-15 people there. They would surely rather live in that nice house, and not on the street. What causes that scarcity that I live alone in a big house, while homeless people roam the streets? Property rights. Property rights cause scarcity way before "natural scarcity" kicks in. To thin…

"If I live alone in a big house with 5 rooms, I could host at least 10-15 people there. They would surely rather live in that nice house, and not on the street."

Would it still be a nice house if 10-15 people with no kinship were crammed into it?

We can see from the way that people chose to spend and live that most people regard privacy as important to their idea of home.

"What causes that scarcity that I live alone in a big house, while homeless people roam the streets? Property rights."

No, scarcity is inherent, as explained earlier.

With your home example, the land itself is scarce. Somebody has invested to build and maintain the building. The house would quickly be ruined and stripped if not for care and property protections.

"Rights protection, in balance, is what allows society to rise above a pile of people consuming everything to scarcity and filling everything to capacity, with no ability to take a long-term view other mere existence."

At the start of the thread, you were using the language of real property to argue for IP. But here, you reveal that you are in fact opposed to real property.

Re: There Are No Good Arguments for Intellectual Property (2010)

#69

Post by dragonwriter »

cturner wrote: post #32
dragonwriter wrote: post #24

The arguments for IP (and intangible personal property more generally) are the same as for property in general: giving those who take action which produces value exclusive rights in the value producing thing promotes development of value which benefits the community. That’s not to say I don’t understand the arguments for generally more limited property rights, but I find right-libertarian, generally property-rights-m…

“action which produces value exclusive rights...” This does not describe “property in general”. (Also, it is gobbledegook.) The concept of property (excluding ip) is extremely straightforward - control of something scarce. Things called IP are not inherently scarce, and the arguments used to justify it are plainly not the same.

> “action which produces value exclusive rights...” This does not describe “property in general”. (Also, it is gobbledegook.)

Yes, in isolation that excerpt which cuts across parts of different phrases from the middle of a sentence is gobbledygook which describes nothing.

Other than being a good illustration of why sentences are meaningful units but arbitrarily selected excerpts from the middle of them are not, I’m not sure what your point is.

Re: There Are No Good Arguments for Intellectual Property (2010)

#70

Post by esyir »

wiz21c wrote: post #41
slver wrote: post #31

Nobody would invest billions in IP if someone from the street can walk by and take it.Is that such a complex subject to understand? IP is not a different concept than property. People like to say "you can't actually steal IP, you get to keep yours". Of course you can steal IP, by using it or redistributing it without compensating the creator, you reduce the value of their IP. You stole from them by taking part of the…

> Nobody would invest billions in IP if someone from the street can walk by and take it. Gross simplification. The simple fact you reason and write about this question is a direct consuequence of the free availability of IP to you : you learned to write, to compute, to think with books and a free incredibly huge flow of ideas. You're basically seeing intellectual production as a thing that should be monetized. Most o…

So, people will dump in the billions of dollars of investment developing drugs and getting them past human trials, only to have them immediately be stolen?

Removal of IP here means that you've enforced a penalty against innovators and creators, and baked incentives for grifting and leeching straight into the system. The system we have right now is flawed, but the remove all IP argument is even worse.

I'll also pre-empt the "But research is government funded" side tangent, getting the drug from a proof of concept/academic study to something that can actually be used is horrendously expensive, and this bit is completely in the domain of private industry. And if you think academia is going to replace that in this no-IP world, you might want to look into how the academia -> industry pipeline actually works.

On a more software side angle, I've found it interesting that the biggest anti-IP people I know also bemoan the general move over to SaaS.

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