- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter (now X) and Square (now Block), sparked a weekend’s worth of debate around intellectual property, patents, and copyright, with a characteristically terse post declaring, “delete all IP law.”
X’s current owner Elon Musk quickly replied, “I agree.”
This is a horrible idea. Why would an author dedicate years of their life to a book only to make no money off of it. Why would I spend time and money prototyping a new invention only to not see a dime from it as a big company steals my idea.
People need to eat and live. If you can’t survive by creating, you do something else instead of creating. How can people not see this very simple concept?
You could literally write the next Lord of the Rings and another company could print and sell the book, sell merch, and make a movie about it and you’d see 0 money. But no one would make movies any more because what’s the point?
People think about getting an the stuff from companies for free and forget that big companies would benefit most with no protection to the little guy. There is a reason why the rich want to do this, honestly think about it.
The rich want to do it because of AI. That’s it.
They can already take whatever you create wihout giving you a dime. What are you gonna do, sue a multi-billion dollar company with a fleet of attorneys on standby? With what money?
They would certainly just settle and give you a pittance just about large enough to cover your attorney fees.
Do you know why companies usually don’t do this? Because they have sufficiently many people hired who do nothing but create stories for the company full time. They do not need your ideas.
Copyright didn’t exist for millenia. It didn’t stop authors from writing books.
Small companies have defend themselves from Apple. People make money from their inventions and writings. There are tons of examples. You’re creating this idea of unbeatable huge corpos that isn’t true. They don’t always win, you can easily prove with with a 1 minute Google search.
They also don’t want it just because of AI, this would enable them to steal and mass produce any IP anyone makes. This includes physical inventions.
Also copyright didn’t exist for a long time and neither did the Internet or global trade. Times change. We went millennia without many things, it doesn’t automatically make them wrong or bad. What a silly basis.
The cases where large companies do win won’t make news though. “Large companies settles with individual” isn’t really headline material now, is it?
Also, small companies != people. Neither me nor you are a company and even small companies have significantly more resources available to them than someone who just created the next Lord of the Rings and didn’t see a penny.
There are significantly more companies who would rather start killing politicians than see IP law gone. They rake in billions of shareholder value, much moreso than any AI company out there.
I never argued that copyright law is necessarily wrong or bad just because we went millenia without it. What I am arguing is that these laws do not allow people to create intellectual works as people in the past were no less artistic than we are today - maybe even moreso.
Have you seen the impact of IP law on science? It’s horrible. No researcher sees any money from their works - rather they must pay to lose their “rights” and have papers published. Scientific journals have hampered scientific progress and will continue to do so for as long as IP law remains. I would not be surprised if millions of needless deaths could have been prevented if only every medical researcher had access to research.
IP law serves solely large companies and independent artists see a couple of breadcrumbs. Abolishing IP law - or at the very least limiting it to a couple of years at most - would have hardly any impact on small artists. The vast, vast, VAST majority of artists make hardly any money already. Just check Bandcamp or itch.io and see how many millions of artists there are who will never ever see success. They do not benefit from IP law - so why should we keep it for the top 0.1% of artists who do?
You’re right. As we all know people only started to create art after IP laws where established.
Nobody ever made something original just for the joy of it. It’s only fair that a single company has the exclusive rights on a pants-wearing mouse that looks a certain way for 95 years.
This is a bad faith argument.
Forms of IP have existed for a long time. And back in your days you didn’t have one company that could have global reach in second.
You still ignore the fact that if I spend 5 years of my life writing a book, it could be taken away with no money to me. So people can no longer dedicate their lives to creating when they have bills to pay.
Have you considered that the problem of not being able to create art for recreational purposes without thinking about its monetary value is the actual issue here?
Yes, I have.
But how exactly does getting rid of IP laws since that exactly? Because that’s what’s being proposed.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear about that. Abolishing IP laws won’t fix capitalism.
There are other solutions for that. Most of them as unrealistic as abolishing IP laws. But we could try universal basic income as a stopgap.
I think UBI would actually solve a lot of issues, the creative communities’ financial struggle being one of them.