Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

What incentive could you possible offer them? If a FAANG wants your 20-man company's trade secrets, all they have to do is offer a key person $500k/year salary.

If a FAANG wants your 20-man company's patent, they are going to pay you for it.

And, as someone who's actually been in court more than a few times, no, they won't kill you via legal bills in a long protracted court case (say, by violating the IP) to get the IP - that happens so rarely you may as well hope for significant winnings at a casino.

And even if they pursue a protracted legal battle hoping to kill the company to acquire the IP, then they have to bid on the open market for it, against other FAANGs!

And even if they do kill the company, then they still have to deal with whoever gets the IP (which is why that strategy is almost never viable), because that IP doesn't become public domain simply because the company died, it will go to someone, somewhere.

>Even aside from the overwhelming historical evidence soundly disproving your point

That has basically nothing to compare against it. The very few attempts that we had in modern times were ultimately sabotaged by capitalism. Maybe those attempts would not succeed even without the sabotage but regardless, of course it's better than feudalism and its predecessors. The key question for me is: is that the best we can do?

Capitalism did sprout innovation, but that does not mean it's the best way to do so. Ignoring the inherent flaws around the profit motive doesn't help anyone.

>Strawman argument

I don't think so, honestly. The reality is that a lot of research is done with the question of "how can we make money solving this problem?", rather than "how can we solve this problem?". You can't deny that.

Maybe categorizing that as pure/non-pure innovation is not a good way to put it, but the incentives of research do change with profit seeking. It's undeniable.

>corrupt regulators that anti-capitalists would happily put into greater positions of power and give more power to meaningfully decrease the quality of human life.

Regulators that are corrupted in search of capital. It's a circular system.

Many do believe that democratically elect people should have more power than private institutions with zero transparency or checks. Not sure exactly how that "decreases the quality of human life". Where did that come from?

Ok you can substitute this with any type of R&D done by individual or small to large companies.

> We see innovation in open source every day from small startups, from various sized communities, and from hobbyists.

Open source is only really successful in areas where it's a cost centre. Generally, companies mainly invest it into when using OS allows them to reduce their costs and they can focus on other ways of making money/differentiating their products. e.g. there would've been a lot less innovation in OS if Google/Meta/etc. didn't make billions from ads and other services.

> and you mentioned books,

Well yeah.. or any creative content.

> abso-fucking-lutely captured by the industry (with their ridiculous 100+ years of copyright

Yes, I also think that's excessive. To be fair though I don't really understand why do people care that much about being able to use Mickey Mouse in their content. In any case it's obviously preferable to not having any IP protection...

From the late 90s to the early 2010s the news industry was very pro-active about making their work freely available to everyone. This made enforcing copyright on news articles not really a thing. Coinciding with this the news industry rapidly shrunk, and is now a shell of what it used to be.

Interestingly, the trend of "free" reporting is now strongly reversing. Many publications now put most of their work behind a paywall, no longer freely giving away the material they produce.

From the book:

"The distribution of news on the Internet makes an interesting contrast to the distribution of music. While the RIAA has used every imaginable legal (and in some cases illegal) strategy to keep music off the Internet, the news reporting industry has embraced the Internet. Most major news agencies have a Web site where news stories may be viewed for, at most, the cost of a free registration. Far from discouraging the copying of news stories, most sites invite you to "e-mail a copy of this story to a friend." In fact, news is available so freely over the Internet that it is possible to create an entire newspaper simply by linking to stories written by other people. An example of such a "newspaper" is the site run by Matt Drudge, which consists almost entirely of links to stories on other sites. Yet the incentive to gather the news has not disappeared. According to intellectual monopolists' preaching, this should be impossible: to report from the Sudan requires the huge cost of going there in person, but copying that same report is as cheap as it can possibly get. So, why are highly paid journalists traveling to the Sudan to get the news?"

What the authors of this book don't state is that, the ramifications of this shift to "freely shared" news has meant that far fewer journalists are out there actually reporting. (The layoffs have been massive.) They go on to say, just a few sentences later that "the news industry has been thriving, profitable."

Obviously, this is just not true. The news industry is struggling. The layoffs have been massive. This type of pain in the industry was happening in 2008, when the book was published, and continues still.

With the authors missing such glaring (and important) facts, it's hard to take their arguments seriously.