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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)

#71

Post by billytetrud »

neonological wrote: post #47
samatman wrote: post #6

The argument for patents is simple and clear: the alternative is broader use of trade secrets. In a patent regime, a company can (indeed must) publish their process, in exchange for a temporary monopoly on exploiting it commercially. In return, everyone else can learn it, implement it for research, and improve it, at which point the patent no longer applies. Copyright was also compelling in the technological milieu i…

Many IPs likely wouldn't even exist if the 10 year monopoly didn't exist. Yeah they patented some parts of DNA and there was a huge debate over it but that patent is almost expired now so the whole debate eventually becomes irrelevant. It's worth it.

As long as they expire in reasonable time, unlike a certain mouse...

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

#72

Post by saithound »

slver wrote: post #62
saithound wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1. I didn't give an argument in favor of YouTube protecting IP rights.

2. No that argument is still silly. It does not work for the same reason: it assumes no agency on part of economic actors. The only way your hypothetical "NotYouTube" could stay in business vs. YouTube is by adding enough value that they actually get ad revenue. If people decide to advertise on "NotYouTube", to the extent that it is profitable to run "NotYouTube", then "NotYouTube" will have the exact same incentive to motivate content creators by sharing part of their ad revenue with them. The argument is precisely that these copycats are a net positive: coordinating against them (playing whack-a-mole) is a net negative, with or without governments.

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

#73

Post by billytetrud »

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…

There is a difference between the concept of patents and copyright, and the very obviously broken implementation of that ideas that exists in society currently.

Saying there's no good reason for IP rights because lawyers can get their way by brute force, is like saying there's no good reason for anyone to ever eat pizza because the pizza place makes bad pizza. Please separate the implementation from the idea.

It's fair to argue that in our current court system and regulatory environment that removing IP protections would be better (i think that's debatable), but it seems intellectually dishonest to say there are no good reasons for IP at the conceptual level.

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

#74

Post by reissbaker »

dmitriid wrote: post #25
reissbaker wrote: post #7

medicine have been produced for ages without IP law Er... I think there's a fairly sizable difference between modern medicine, in which we can develop an effective cure for a pandemic within a year of the pandemic starting, and historical medicine in which the Black Death ravaged countries for years and was never cured, only adapted to after countless lives were lost. I don't think the modern medical industry would w…

> I think there's a fairly sizable difference between modern medicine, in which we can develop an effective cure for a pandemic within a year of the pandemic starting, and historical medicine Yes, there is a difference, and it's striking. For example, despite the pandemic the wealthy countries have voted overwhelmingly against waiving patents on the long-needed vaccine: https://www.msf.org/countries-obstructing-covid…

Yes, there is a difference, and it's striking.

For example, despite the pandemic the wealthy countries have voted overwhelmingly against waiving patents on the long-needed vaccine

Correct. In modern times, the countries that developed the vaccine are insisting on getting paid for it. In historical times, vaccines didn't exist and everyone died when a pandemic struck.

The reason the countries that developed the vaccines voted against waiving patents is precisely because they believe that IP is required for the modern medical industry to function. The historical alternative to IP law is trade secrets, which is much worse for medicine, which has made its advancements on the back of researchers publishing and sharing their work. And with trade secrets, even assuming that the mRNA research and development necessary had somehow been funded and done entirely in-house since no one would be publishing it, still Pfizer would demand to be paid for its vaccines, and no one could copy them because they wouldn't have told anyone how to make them.

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

#75

Post by slver »

saithound wrote: post #72
slver wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1. I didn't give an argument in favor of YouTube protecting IP rights. 2. No that argument is still silly. It does not work for the same reason: it assumes no agency on part of economic actors. The only way your hypothetical "NotYouTube" could stay in business vs. YouTube is by adding enough value that they actually get ad revenue. If people decide to advertise on "NotYouTube", to the extent that it is profitable to…

> The only way your hypothetical "NotYouTube" could stay in business vs. YouTube is by adding enough value that they actually get ad revenue.

Well, they have the same content as YouTube for starters. So all they need is a slightly sexier or faster app, and they're done.

> "NotYouTube" will have the exact same incentive to motivate content creators by sharing part of their ad revenue with them.

"NotYouTube" doesn't have content creators. Why would they. They have YouTube's content.

See, the part you keep missing in your analysis is that without IP rights, NotYoutube doesn't need original content, full stop. It just needs to copy/paste YouTube's content. They don't have to share ad revenue with anyone.

You really need to think through the entire chain of events that'll unfold if we had no IP rights. Creators will no longer be someone you need to deal with. They're just the gullible idiots who made something on their own, for others to just take it and profit from it.

In a world without IP rights, content is worthless. So who would bother producing it? Let's figure that out. The only way for content producers to profit would be product placement deals. However the product placement should be inseparable from the content, because in a world without IP rights, anyone can just cut out the ads and sponsored messages from your content.

So what's the conclusion here? All content will be just... ads. Not videos WITH ads. But the videos themselves will be ads. Ads for products you can sell, as those are the only thing you can sell for money in a world without IP rights. Probably also political propaganda, as politicians can pay for that as well, and then embezzle it from the budget. That's going to be all of it. Wow, I just got sad imagining that.

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

#76

Post by hyperman1 »

lelandbatey wrote: post #16
samatman wrote: post #6

The argument for patents is simple and clear: the alternative is broader use of trade secrets. In a patent regime, a company can (indeed must) publish their process, in exchange for a temporary monopoly on exploiting it commercially. In return, everyone else can learn it, implement it for research, and improve it, at which point the patent no longer applies. Copyright was also compelling in the technological milieu i…

You've rightfully pointed out that there used to be good arguments for intellectual property, arguments which definitely used to have merit since they brought our existing legal framework of intellectual property into this world. The future of intellectual property though, seems quite in doubt. I'll not re-elaborate the points made in the original article, and instead I'll state what I believe the future will actuall…

I saw from the pirate party a presentation where copyright came to be as a reaction on the printing press. The catholic church feared to lose control over what information people would receive, and the scribes required protection. The state liked this control too, so a monopoly was added to law.

So there used to be mostly bad reasons for IP. It was always the haves repressing the havenots.

Not the one I read, but another source with a similar story: https://torrentfreak.com/nothing-new-under-the-copyright-ecl...

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

#77

Post by reissbaker »

ruined wrote: post #12
reissbaker wrote: post #7

medicine have been produced for ages without IP law Er... I think there's a fairly sizable difference between modern medicine, in which we can develop an effective cure for a pandemic within a year of the pandemic starting, and historical medicine in which the Black Death ravaged countries for years and was never cured, only adapted to after countless lives were lost. I don't think the modern medical industry would w…

the covid vaccine was not developed for profit, it was developed because the alternative was the literal end of the world as we know it. they'd been sitting on the tech for thirty years because it was not profitable, in fact https://www.salon.com/2021/01/24/the-hero-biochemist-who-pio... and now that it's finished it's immediately applicable to all kinds of diseases that currently and historically have generated mass…

they'd been sitting on the tech for thirty years because it was not profitable

So what you're saying is... If there had been a profit incentive, they wouldn't have sat on it? That seems like a strong argument for the profit motive: if you make it unprofitable, it doesn't get acted on.

That being said, I actually don't think your claim of "they'd been sitting on the tech for thirty years because it was not profitable" is supported by the Salon article you posted. Instead it says that a young researcher got frequent pushback in the 90s on a possibly-promising, but not fully-developed idea that turned out to be correct, because it was viewed as too novel or as unworkable. And in fact, in the 90s, it actually was unworkable. She didn't figure out how to make it work even theoretically until 2005.

That doesn't mean the pushback was right — although many breakthroughs have gotten pushback before being proven correct. But it's definitely incorrect to claim that it was sat on for thirty years "because it was unprofitable." Thirty years ago it did not work because they hadn't yet discovered the nucleoside modifications necessary for the human immune system not to immediately destroy mRNA vaccines. It wasn't even theoretically possible until 2005. And in less than a decade of proving it was theoretically possible she was hired away from UPenn by BioNTech to work on productionizing her work on mRNA vaccines — which had still never been successfully made before in humans. In less than a decade since, they have made a successful mRNA vaccine for COVID.

So, I guess what I'm saying is, I think the system mostly worked out? It could have been smoother but it does seem to have succeeded.

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

#78

Post by dmitriid »

reissbaker wrote: post #74
dmitriid wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think there's a fairly sizable difference between modern medicine, in which we can develop an effective cure for a pandemic within a year of the pandemic starting, and historical medicine Yes, there is a difference, and it's striking. For example, despite the pandemic the wealthy countries have voted overwhelmingly against waiving patents on the long-needed vaccine: https://www.msf.org/countries-obstructing-covid…

Yes, there is a difference, and it's striking. For example, despite the pandemic the wealthy countries have voted overwhelmingly against waiving patents on the long-needed vaccine Correct. In modern times, the countries that developed the vaccine are insisting on getting paid for it. In historical times, vaccines didn't exist and everyone died when a pandemic struck. The reason the countries that developed the vaccin…

Yes. "Insisting to be paid" for a vaccine to combat global pandemic.

If you don't see an issue with that, then you need to amend the following:

> In historical times, vaccines didn't exist and everyone died when a pandemic struck.

Amendment: now it's the poor countries who die.

> The historical alternative to IP law is trade secrets

Yes, historically it is. But it's shades and shades of possibilities between "you pay, or you die" and "you pay, or you die, but for different reasons"

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

#79

Post by modo_mario »

neilwilson wrote: post #19
samatman wrote: post #6

The argument for patents is simple and clear: the alternative is broader use of trade secrets. In a patent regime, a company can (indeed must) publish their process, in exchange for a temporary monopoly on exploiting it commercially. In return, everyone else can learn it, implement it for research, and improve it, at which point the patent no longer applies. Copyright was also compelling in the technological milieu i…

"The argument for patents is simple and clear: the alternative is broader use of trade secrets." Yet it falls into the neat, plausible and wrong category of ideas. In reality that isn't what happens, and it is based upon the assumption that ideas are unique and only occur once, when we know that ideas are ten a penny, and it is implementations in practice that we are short of - something that is exacerbated when you…

There's also the issue of tactics being used to extend hold on these concepts indefinitely. Intel and AMD don't have much competition going in their duopoly i believe in part because by the time their patents would run out the processor standards have been extended with new technologies blocking anyone from ever entering that space to compete and help innovate.

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

#80

Post by MagnumOpus »

reissbaker wrote: post #7

medicine have been produced for ages without IP law Er... I think there's a fairly sizable difference between modern medicine, in which we can develop an effective cure for a pandemic within a year of the pandemic starting, and historical medicine in which the Black Death ravaged countries for years and was never cured, only adapted to after countless lives were lost. I don't think the modern medical industry would w…

> develop an effective cure for a pandemic within a year of the pandemic starting [...] You can maybe first-principles your way to an idea of a way to produce large amounts of novel, working medicine quickly without IP law, but that's at best theorycrafting and doesn't have a whole lot of evidence backing it up AFAIK

Are you aware that an effective Oxford COVID vaccine was developed by a university without the pharma industry IP protection and funding? Are you aware that it is being manufactured by multiple pharma companies at-cost?

Believe it or not, quite a few people are motivated to help fellow humans survive a pandemic even if does not create shareholder value or a billion-dollar patent portfolio.

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