- 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.”
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I’m pretty much on board with getting rid of software patents as they are absolutely ridiculous, but I don’t think we should necessarily get rid of the rest, but they do require reform.
So delete all pharmaceutical IP to make drugs accessible to everyone and save taxpayers trillions?
“Noooo, not like that!”
Lol we all know trump would put pharmaceuticals on the exemption list.
This is why it’s a mixed bag for me. IP law is kinda important in a capitalist system, which, for better or worse, that’s what we have. If someone comes up with a wonder drug that outright cures addiction or something, you’d want that person to be able to recoup their costs before a bigger organization with more capital swoops in and undercuts them on production costs until they’re the sole supplier of the drug. The hepatitis C cure drug selling for $70,000 is a great example of this quandary; there’s millions of dollars worth of research and clinical trials that went into developing the drug, you’d want the company to be able to recuperate the costs of developing it or else there’s less incentive to do something similar for other diseases down the line. Also, though, $70,000 or go fucking die is an outrageous statement.
Of course, what we have for IP law in practice is a bastardized monster, where corporations exploit the fuck out of it to have monopoly control over important products like insulins and life-saving medications that cost cents to produce and allow them to sell for hundreds a dose. That’s not the intent of IP law, IMO, and that doesn’t really serve anyone.
idk i think our incentive should be to cure diseases with public funding and make people healthy instead of for profit but what do i know
Companies will not — ever — dump hundreds of millions/billions into developing a drug only to have it be sold at cost or even worse, completely losing out on it when a competitor sells a copy of it at a price you can’t match.
And even if they did, they’d very quickly go bankrupt.
We may not like it, but that’s the system that we have. Some form of IP law should exist to encourage these companies to continue putting out medicines that better our lives, it’s just that our current ones go way too far.
We already fund the research of new drugs almost entirely through publicly funded projects which then HAND OVER the patent rights to whichever company has the most former board members in the executive branch at the time.
I watched it happen in real time during covid while working for the DPH. Those companies produce NOTHING. They are the literal obstacle to creating new medicines and making them widely available.
I’m against the context of the main post but putting on a cape for medical patents is wild. The entirety of healthcare in america is inexcusable. Let’s stay focused on the AI tech oligarchs robbing us of our futures and attempting to frame it as a concern with intellectual property.
If you only funded drugs through public funding, that means the government has a say in what drugs get funded and which don’t, meaning any and all drugs that don’t affect the broadest number of people simply won’t get funded.
Drugs will no longer be for all people, it’ll be strictly the people that vote for the government in charge. So… No hormone treatments, no birth control, no vaccines, no aids research, nothing that doesn’t explicitly align with the government.
First of all, governments already do fund all the research.
Even in your hypothetical, thats just one government. It doesn’t stop medical advancement entirely just because one dictatorship stops funding research. It moves elsewhere. When nazi germany declared that nobody would receive funding for anything outside of Aryan research ^tm the scientists just left to a country that wasn’t barbarically stupid.
Also, everything in your final paragraph is stuff that is happening now, in america, under the capitalist organization of the economy which gives all the rights to a private company after publicly funding the research and development of their drugs. It makes no difference, save the fact that now the authoritarian government in power has consolidated billions of dollars for rich capitalists who will gladly accept the orders to no longer produce those medicines while remaining disgustingly wealthy.
Even if you believe in the delusional idea that private companies are funding the development of novel treatments entirely on their own the fact remains that drugs are currently, as we speak, not for all people. I am pointing out the solution to that problem, and the response was to point out how, if we did what I said, then what’s already happening now would be the consequence.
Except no, they don’t.
If it’s state funded then that’s obviously a different matter.
But usually it’s a company making drugs, and they’d go bust if they spent billions developing a drug and got zero money back. Then there would be far fewer drugs made.
Be practical. Letting people die for ideological reasons is not a good thing.
How, when more companies would be able to develop the same drug? And they don’t develop drugs, they develop ways to extend their patents.
More companies will develop that drug.
But think of it this way. You’re the CEO of a pharmaceutical company that makes drugs, vaccines, etc that saves lives. You do this for a profit.
You’re presented with a plan to make a drug that, idk, lessens the symptoms of Crohn’s Disease. It’ll cost $2 billion to create and bring to market.
After it’s done being created, and the drug spends 10+ years in clinical testing, it’s on shelves. You have to price each box at $10 in order to break even after 5 years, so you do so.
But the law has changed, now anybody can manufacture the drug. A competitor who didn’t foot any of the development costs or do any of the hard work is selling each box at $0.80. you can’t compete with that, you make an enormous loss and your company edges closer to bankruptcy.
One of your workers comes to you with plans for a $2bn project that will hopefully reduce migraines. Given lessons learned from the previous example, do you go ahead with the plan? Will the board even let you?
I agree that IP laws in the sector need to be pared down, but scrapping them entirely would prevent any company from creating new drugs, as they’d be absolutely certain they wouldn’t be able to recoup development and regulatory hurdle costs.
In an ideal world, all drugs would be made by governments, for a loss, and open sourced, so the market could compete on price. But that’s not the world we live in.
I wrote a long winded reply but honestly I’ll just say that your second paragraph is entirely based on fiction and your final paragraph is precisely what for profit medicine is designed to do. Profit is a purely ideological drive, medicine and healthcare do not need profits to exist. The post office does not need to make money. It exists because we HAVE to have it.
You can go see for yourself. Moderna did not single handedly make the covid vaccine. They do not and should not have the right to deny anyone the right to produce it as cheaply as necessary to provide it to their populations. I can go deeper if you want but if this doesn’t show you that we are saying the same thing I’m going to have doubts about this being in good faith.
It’s not fiction, that’s the reality.
Profit is a purely ideological drive, medicine and healthcare do not need profits to exist.
No shit. Everyone knows that. But it does exist. That’s the world we live in. Income tax doesn’t need to exist, but it does, and things would go wrong if you suddenly stopped paying it.
Moderna did not single handedly make the covid vaccine
Who said they did? Many companies did, and some had government or university help.
I can go deeper if you want
Go as deep as you like. I’ve already explained the situation, though.
I am speaking in good faith. How do you go about avoiding companies simply refusing to create new medications when they know for a fact making new ones would cost billions and they’d never get the money back?
I don’t like that that’s the situation. I want companies to make medications and sell them at a loss, but that’s a fantasy world. I’m being pragmatic. We can improve IP laws without completely killing off future medicine development.
“Just, like, don’t make profit, broooo” would be nice, but that’s not how the world works.
I agree, though I will note that I have often found that there is a non-trivial gap between what is and what ought to be.
The problem I mostly have is even when those costs are recouped most companies fight tooth and nail to keep the prices high and unaffordable in order to line the pockets of investors.
Yes, 100%.
I see the point you’re aiming at, but it’s not little companies discovering new drugs it’s giant corporations (often on the back of government research money) who then ‘swoop in’ to protect their own profits while people in underdeveloped nations die of tuberculosis or whatever because they would rather make money than save lives.
You might be surprised how small medical research labs can be. The lady responsible for nanolipid particles used in transporting rNA vaccines, in similar fashion to how an organelle gets packaged in membrane and cast out, spent decades cruising on bare minimum public funding.
What costs money is testing phases, including a lab to hold and propogate immortal cell lines and later production lines to create enough doses for thousands of human trials.
Although tbh I don’t expect the USA to be upholding strict drug safety standards in the near future.
I was speaking generally and obviously there are exceptions and contributions from all over the place. But it’s not tiny labs like that that hold a death-grip on the patents to drugs that are being sold for absurd amounts of money that are far out of reach of the people who need them. Also while I recognize that this kind of research is expensive it must also be recognized that much of that research is funded, directly or indirectly, by the US government through the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control, etc, so the fact that these big corporations are effectively getting a hand-out and then charging an arm and a leg for it sticks in my craw. But then maybe I’m just weird for thinking that human life is more important than quarterly profits.
What costs money is testing phases, including a lab to hold and propogate immortal cell lines and later production lines to create enough doses for thousands of human trials.
Thank you. These arguments are always hard to read. Sure, small labs are where it usually starts, but without enormous and risky investments, we would never have the drugs we have today. Most of these investments fail miserably, so one successful drug must cover the costs of ten unsuccessful ones. Nobody would do that if their IP weren’t protected. It’s more about reputation than facts when it comes to this topic.
Unless it were completely government funded, but that’s clearly not was Illegal Immigrant Billionaire Elon Musk and the Orange Felon are proposing so yeah, IP Laws applying to Pharmaceuticals all the way.
In the US the tax payer subsidizes almost all drug research. Between 2010 and 2019 the NIH spent $184 Billion on all but 2 drugs approved by the FDA.
It worked out to about $1.5 Billion for each R&D product with a novel target and about $600 mill for each R&D product with multiple targets.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10148199/
Or
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullarticle/2804378
The cost to develop each drug is between about $1 and $2.5 Billion
I’m not sure how much is subsidized outside of NIH but I’d imagine other countries are doing the same.
Why should companies own the whole IP or perhaps why should they have any ownership if most of the funding is from the public?
This is a great point. I know that some pharmas actually do internally funded research, it’s a thing, it happens, but it’s completely dwarfed by shareholder giveaways and government subsidies ofc.
The development of new medications should be 100% funded by governments and the IP that comes out of it should be 100% if the government, aka the people.
Governments are the ones that do the investments of projects that don’t directly make money but are good for humanity.
You don’t like that and the hepac drug can suddenly cost 70 dollars
You’re right.
Do it., but also ensure that all work enters the public domain and is free for anyone to use, modify, commercialize, or basically whatever the GPL says.
That’s what would happen if copyright doesn’t exist. If a company releases something, it’s immediately public domain, because no law protects it.
GPL
The GPL is very much not the public domain.
It’s an interesting point that without any IP law, GPL would be invalid and corporations could use and modify things like Lemmy without complying with the license.
Exactly. They wouldn’t be obligated to contribute back at all, so someone like Meta could just rebrand Lemmy into something else and throw ads everywhere.
They already could. Lemmy’s users are not the ones who run the software. It’s like Google’s usage of Linux. They can keep their changes to themselves.
They can only keep them to themselves if they don’t distribute the changes. Since Google distributes Android, they need to release their changes to Linux on Android under the GPL. Since they don’t distribute their server code, they don’t need to share their changes.
But then corporations could not stop anyone from modifying their modifications to things like Lemmy.
Well, they wouldn’t need to release those changes publicly.
But then anyone could take them anyway.
The GPL is basically trying to make a world without copyright. The GPL basically only has teeth in a world where copyright exists. If copyright didn’t exist then everything would be in the public domain and the GPL would be toothless, but that’s fine because it would no longer be unnecessary.
No, the GPL very much requires copyright to work. The whole point is copyleft, which obligates changes to the code remain under the same license and be available to everyone.
Without copyright, companies just wouldn’t share their changes at all. The whole TIVO-ization clause in the GPL v3 would be irrelevant since TIVO can very much take without giving back. Copyright is very much essential to the whole concept of the GPL working.
Just think, why would anyone want to use Linux if Microsoft or Apple could just bake Linux into their offering?
No, the GPL very much requires copyright to work
That’s what I said.
If copyright didn’t exist then everything would be in the public domain and the GPL would be toothless, but that’s fine because it would no longer be unnecessary.
I’m saying it is necessary to achieve the aims of the GPL.
If it was just about ensuring the source is free, the MIT license would be sufficient. The GPL goes further and forces modifications to also be free, which relies on copyright.
I’m saying it is necessary to achieve the aims of the GPL.
Until copyright no longer exists and everything is in the public domain, as I said.
How are you going to enforce the GPL in a world where copyright doesn’t exist?
How are you going to enforce the GPL in a world where copyright doesn’t exist?
And that’s what I’m saying, you can’t, therefore the aims of the GPL cannot be achieved. The GPL was created specifically to force modifications to be shared. The MIT license was created to be as close to public domain as possible, but within a copyright context (the only obligation is to retain the license text on source distributions).
If everything is public domain, then there would be no functional changes to MIT-licensed code, whereas GPL-licensed code would become a free-for-all with companies no longer being obligated to share their changes.
I’m saying it is necessary to achieve the aims of the GPL.
Which would make GPL toothless, but that’s fine because it would no longer be unnecessary.
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Nonono, see, they will have punitive contracts with employees that will nail them to the wall if they leak source code.
They like rules as long as they’re the one writing them.
This isn’t as forward thinking as you’d want it to be.
For as much as they are abused, “IP laws” protect small and individual inventors, writers, composers, etc.
With no patent, copyright or trademark protections the billionaires will own or bury everything.
What is needed is to bring the laws back to their intended purpose.
But how much do IP laws actually protect the little guy? When a large corporation can bankrupt me by prolonging litigation until I have nothing left, what leverage do I really have?
There are certainly cases where small creators and inventors were able to overcome this disadvantage, but I suspect that they are the tiny minority, celebrated when they do achieve it.
The imbalance against giant corporations isn’t anything to sneeze at, but there are just as many (probably more) small time companies breaking copyright law and hoping nobody notices. For example, stealing artwork to print on cheap crap that you sell below what the creator is selling them for. If they’re in an area that recognizes that copyright then they’re going to lose every time, and they’re not going to have enough money to drag it out. After that happens artists can recover all the earnings that were made with their work. Without that the artist is just fucked.
“Whatabout…”
The reason IP exists isn’t a whatabout, it kinda sounds like you just don’t want to hear about anyone other than giant corporations benefitting from it.
Fundamentally it should be an attribution and reward system, whereas currently it’s a false scarcity system.
Everyone should be able to use everything, but you should be required to attribute your source material. If you do, the song / work etc should get an extra licensing fee per play. That way you’re always encouraged to provide attribution since you don’t lose money from it, and wholly original works will be cheaper and thus more desirable.
Not dissimilar to how song sampling works today but without all the manual negotiation for every license.
And if you fail to provide attribution you get hit with appropriate penalties.
The problem with attribution is the difficulty of 1000% accurate compliance.
If you grab 100 lines of code from a repository, or five paragraphs from a story, there’s probably a claim there. If you grab a single word, there’s probably not. But in the middle, there’s a paralysis of uncertainty-- is n lines similar enough to create liability? Can you remember where you saw what reliably? You end up with a bias towards “over-attribution” and it becomes difficult to pare it back. Does everything need a full Git-style commit history? Are we forever stuck keeping a credit on a project because it’s difficult to prove you’ve fully scrubbed their contributions?
Focus on how we pay artists (ideally lush grants) and forget about credit. Maybe establish a culture where it’s voluntary and acceptable-- that people feel that they’re allowed to cite their raw materials, and reuse doesn’t make the work lesser-- but don’t try to use the courts to force people to try to remember and track where they saw something when they just want to create, or it creates a hostile environment.
It’s not an easy system but it doesn’t seem any more arduous to say “you can copy X for a fee” vs “you can’t copy X at all.”
That conundrum already exists with the current system, though.
Aren’t there already pretty specific laws about what amount of a work can be copied before it’s plagiarism?
Not that I’m aware of.
For as much as they are abused, “IP laws” protect small and individual inventors, writers, composers, etc.
Do they? Or do they protect the huge companies that those people have to assign their IP to?
With no patent, copyright or trademark protections the billionaires will own or bury everything.
Trademark protection - yes, it’s very important. Same as authorship vs copyright, copyright might be harmful, but authorship is necessary to protect.
If “delete all IP law” means that you can’t be sued for using something copyrighted, like, say, openly using Opera Presto leaked sources or making a Nintendo console emulator, and that you can’t be sued for rounded corners, and that you can’t be sued for using some proprietary hardware interface without royalties, - then it may be good.
But I think these people are after copyleft.
Still, interesting, how many different people are today implementing what was being discussed in very vague strokes 10-15 years ago. All of it at the same time, breaking everything. I mean really all of it. Signal is one of the common ideas, Musk’s DOGE is another, federation model being alive again is another, and all the ghouls around. A full Brazilian carnival of grotesque ideas. I want my childhood back (Signal is cool, but the rest is not).
That last sentence is it. IP laws are outrageous monstrosities these days, with folks like Disney getting 100-year long exclusive IP rights to characters and stuff like the DMCA.
Interesting considering the lack of IP law is going to become Tesla’s downfall.
Isn’t Hollywood going to unleash armies of lawyers on them?
Tech companies have more and don’t want IP getting in the way of AI.
I would love those 2 to have the most expensive trial in history
Would be amazing. Legal piracy of everything, generics and knock offs, love it.
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Yeah man, pull that ladder up behind you!
In what sense is a ladder getting pulled up if IP is respected? Anyone can make a new IP, there’s not a limited supply of imagination. You can’t make everyone like what you come up with or buy it, but why should that entitle you to being able to profit off someone else’s work?
I’m fully in favour of abolishing IP law for everyone, ideally globally.
Public domain everything.
I suspect that isn’t the picture these two have in mind. It’s going to be the same as Musk’s demand for free speech, which just turns out to mean “let me be an asshole and you’re not allowed to complain.” This one is going to be “I get to profit off your ideas, but you’re not allowed to use mine.”
That would just ensure that no one ever commits resources to developing something new…
Not necessarily? You’d retain first-to-market advantages, particularly where implementation is capital-heavy - and if that’s not enough you could consider an alternative approach to rewarding innovation such as having a payout or other advantage for individuals or entities which undertake significant research and development to emerge with an innovative product.
I think the idea that nobody would commit to developing anything in the absence of intellectual property law is also maybe a bit too cynical? People regularly do invest resources into developing things for the public domain.
At the very least, innovations developed with a significant amount of public funding - such as those which emerge from research universities with public funding or collaborative public-private endeavours at e.g. pharmaceutical companies - should be placed into the public domain for everybody to benefit from, and the copyright period should be substantially reduced to something more like five years.
Felt like it was pretty clearly hyperbolic.
People who work in public domain also need jobs to sustain their ability to do so.
Yes, but sometimes producing for the public domain is their job. Sponsorships, grants, and other funding instruments exist for people who do work which is committed to the public domain.
Yes, but sometimes producing for the public domain is their job.
Which is paid for most often by proprietary companies. Take a look at the OBS webpage.
People famously invented nothing before copyright law.
No no no the world has always worked the way my flawed ideology requires!!!
The internet famously didn’t exist before copyright law. People also famously steal all IP in China.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Request_for_Comments
Your choice example of technology to support IP laws is… something that was created publically and is a collection of open, public standards 🤦🤦🤦 do you think the internet is patented…? By who??? Lmao
Your choice example of technology to support IP laws is… something that was created publically and is a collection of open, public standards
No 🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️ you’re intentionally misrepresenting my statement.
So here’s your chance to clarify your statement and represent it the way you intended
I don’t waste my time engaging in bad faith discussion.
That’s why the Sistine Chapel has the little © 1512 painted in the corner
That’s only true of the too few people that control too much resources
Huh?
Read Debt by David Graeber
No.
Instead of explaining what you mean, you’re just going to casually suggest they read a roughly 500 page book and hope that clears it up for them?
Yes.
The large majority of resources and facilities are owned by a small minority of wealthy individuals whose only goal is making money. People with more interest and passion in the field in question would continue to innovate as long as they had the resources to do so.
People with more interest and passion in the field in question would continue to innovate as long as they had the resources to do so.
But…they don’t. And if you removed IP law then they still wouldn’t…
I’ll have to look at that later.
It’ll affect it, but it won’t stop it. This is a good question to bring up though.
I design medical devices. IP is incredibly important in this process to protect our R&D investment in the current system. If IP didn’t exist, we’d protect that through other means like obfuscation of function.
Also if IP didn’t exist, I could design devices that are so much better at healing people. So much of what I do is restricted because someone else has 30 years left on what they patented.
R&D is expensive. Just because you see what someone else did, doesn’t mean you can easily replicate it.
In short: if your goal is pure profit, yeah removing IP probably hurts this a little. If your goal is producing the best product, then get rid of it.
Obfuscating how things work and trade secrets mean some knowledge is never shared. The ideal behind the patent system is that information is made public but protected for a limited time. The system has strayed from the ideal, but there is still a need for it.
Patents in the US and most countries expire 20 years after filing or 17 years after issuing. It’s not 30 years.
Capitalism stifles innovation
Cory Doctorow has made a pretty convincing argument that in your real specifically, all designs should be open source. That way, if a company goes bankrupt or simply stops supporting a device, like (say) an implant that allows them to see, or a pacemaker, or whatever, they can pursue repairs without the help of the OEM.
Open source is effectively no different than public domain in this circumstance. You don’t have less rights
So much of what I do is restricted because someone else has 30 years left on what they patented.
If they didn’t patent it, that technology never would have existed in the first place for you to steal from.
I think the best solution would be a much shorter exclusionary period for patents.
100% agreed on that account.
In short: if your goal is pure profit, yeah removing IP probably hurts this a little
“A little”? If there’s no IP you just pay a janitor or an employee a million bucks to send you all the information and documentation and you manufacture the product yourself and undercut the company actually engineering the product so they can never be profitable.
Like, this all seems very obvious to me…
People made stuff before patents existed. In many cases there were certain people and groups that were sought out because they simply did things better than others who made the same things.
Knowing how someone else makes something doesn’t mean you can make it as well as the other person. Making quality goods is the same as cooking meals, the people and techniques are far more important than the designs.
People made stuff before patents existed.
People also didn’t make stuff before patents existed. That’s why they exist.
Knowing how someone else makes something doesn’t mean you can make it as well as the other person.
Not necessarily, but often you can. You also don’t have to, you just have to make it cheaper, which you can because you are benefitting from someone else’s investment.
The fact we’re not all still using oldawan industry proves you false
…no? It doesn’t.
People also didn’t make stuff before patents existed. That’s why they exist.
What didn’t they make?
Not necessarily, but often you can. You also don’t have to, you just have to make it cheaper, which you can because you are benefitting from someone else’s investment.
How many restaurants make fries? How many companies make a drink called cola? Are they all identical?
Why do they keep making making those prodicts when they aren’t covered by patents?
I don’t know. They didn’t make them.
That was fine before mass production made perfect copies possible on an industrial scale.
You don’t need the person when you can copy the object and produce it at volume and scale because you already own the factories.
Mass production copies are far from perfect. Like the dollar store version of anything is shit tier even if it looks the same. I’m not talking snobby high end or anything, just well made vs trash tier.
Hell, most of the goods we buy are made by a factory contracted with the person who designed and distributes the materials. That was true before we moved manufacturing overseas too. Cars were one of the few factories that were owned and operated by the companies that design and distribute the goods.
Mass production started long before cars. The industrial revolution began in the 17th century. Interchangeable parts was invented by Eli Whitney. He showed a flint lock that could be assembled by anyone, instead of a skilled metal worker that needed to customize each part so they fit together perfectly.
Outside of art, machine made parts are far more perfect than hand crafted.
that technology never would have existed in the first place
Oh gee, a wildly incorrect assumption
Oh gee, a rational contradiction supported with evidence.
Busting of telecom monopolies doesn’t lead to nobody building telecom infrastructure. And without state monopoly on alcohol production alcohol drinks don’t become a deficit. They just become cheaper and less incentivizing - that’s considered, but you have to solve deadlocks.
I don’t understand what any of that has to do with the topic at hand…?
I agree with your overall point and am not trying to argue against it, but rather to provide an interesting historical fact: I happen to know of one example where this did in fact lead to nobody building telecom infrastructure in an area.
I lived in Albuquerque, NM in the late 90s/early 2000s when telcos were rolling out DSL infrastructure across the country. The local telco, US West, refused to do so (largely because their POTS network was aging and rickety at the best of times - the phone line hookup to my apartment building was still using old gel-pack connectors from the 60s), even after being taken to court over it, and happily paid $200k/mo in fines for a couple years to avoid doing so. It wasn’t until US West was bought out by Qwest in 2000 that they finally rolled out DSL. I am generally extremely anti-monopoly so I think the break-up was definitely a good thing, but I attribute this to the break-up because a larger company would be in a better position to mitigate the costs of upgrading the infrastructure in one area with the profits from another or whatever.
because a larger company would be in a better position to mitigate the costs of upgrading the infrastructure in one area with the profits from another or whatever.
In this case it appears that it was a small monopoly. Where I live one can generally change a telco without changing your physical exact location. Lots of clumsy wires though under the ceiling near the elevator.
But that was off topic, I’ll add one small point - a bigger company could do what you described too.
Nobody does anything anymore and we’ll all just die. Gotcha.
Yes that’s totally what I said.
Not strictly true, if we’re talking about pharmaceuticals or other types of trade information, it would lead us back to a world of fiercely guarded corporate secrets. Here’s your medicine drug, but we won’t tell you anything about how its made or whats in it.
Because no one ever commited resources to develop something new before IP laws were invented, right?? 🤡🤡🤡
Did you not notice that almost the entire realm of technology runs on open source software largely written by volunteers? Yes your laptop may run a proprietary piece of software but not the servers it talks to, your phone, your apps, the cash register at the store, the computer chip in your kids toys etc…
Yet they did it anyway, my point is about the power of our intrinsic motivation to create, not our obvious need for food and shelter etc…
Now imagine if ip laws were removed. Any company could take open source work and sell it as their own while ignoring any GPL that requires the source code to be distributed.
I would point at Android as an example of what would happen. It’s not public domain but the end result is similar, namely that the open source originator (AOSP) suffers from a severe lack of features compared to the commercial offerings.
The default AOSP apps are incredibly barebones compared to the ones Google and the carriers put in their ROMs. You have to choose between “have nothing more than the basic features and compatibility with only well-established services” or “get the latest and greatest with all the bells and whistles (plus a huge heaping of telemetry and invasive advertising)”.
It turns out it’s really hard to compete with a major corporation who can throw entire teams at a problem and can legally copy anything you add to your own version. That’s not even getting into the things that open source projects lack due to their haphazard team structure such as unified UX designs (Blender pre-2.8 and GIMP pre-3.0/unified window mode being the most famous examples of terrible user interfaces that lingered for far too many years).
Do you not notice that those volunteers have bills to pay and need jobs and income from somewhere? The world doesn’t run on goodwill.
So… what, are you denying that open source software exists because people have to pay bills…?
The point is every business cannot be a volunteer organization.
Right, because no one ever does anything for reasons other than money. You definitely get paid to clean up the neighborhood park or help your buddy move right?
Right, because no one ever does anything for reasons other than money.
Of course they do. What they don’t do is spend millions of dollars in R&D only to have that researched duplicated by someone else who then sells the same product for a quarter of the price…
You’re right, no one spends millions of dollars in R&D without expecting to earn a profit from it…
They spend hundreds of billions instead.
President Biden’s budget proposal for FY2025 includes approximately $201.9 billion for R&D, $7.4 billion (4%) above the FY2024 estimated level of $194.6 billion (see figure). Adjusted for inflation to FY2023 dollars, the President’s FY2025 R&D proposal represents a constant-dollar increase of 1.5% above the FY2024 estimated level.
…that’s the government
…and that’s moving the goalposts.
In my initial comment I said ‘no one’, and your first reply did not narrow the scope. I even said ‘no one’ again in my reply and you did not narrow the scope then either. So the standard was ‘no one does this’, except I’ve now shown an example of someone who does, so trying to qualify that now by adding some new arbitrary standard is just moving the goalposts. If the government does it then the fact that no one does it is false, isn’t it?
I didn’t move anything, you’re just playing stupid semantics games to win internet points. I have no interest in such vapid arguments.
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.
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.
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?
I’d be in favor of a phase out of IP law. It would probably require a LOT more public investment in the arts and sciences. But public funding would lead to public ownership, so society would benefit on the whole.
No one would be getting rich off of creative works, but we would want to be sure that people will still make a living.
Or UBI would work even better.
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Hey, the broken clock’s right!
IP law always had a built-in scale pronlem. Without a registration-required copyright model, and probably some sort of mandatory licensing rate system, the sheer logistics of finding and arranging rights made a lot of business models inpractical. (For example, why aren’t modern bookstores just print-on-demand kiosks, or streaming services have All The Content? In large part because it would cost thousands to track down owners and negotiate terms for $1.87 in royalties multiplied by every item in the catalog.)
This was ignorable for a long time, or even a commercial advantage for firms with access to large, pre-negotiated catalogs. The AI boom created a surprise market of non-incumbents who need to get access to a lot of IP in a streamlined manner.
If we open the door for bulk IP clearance to grant the AI bubble a stro ger legal footing, it can also allow other, potentially more interesting business ideas to slip through.
Saying something and putting it into action are entirely different. If he does it, I will personally build a statue of musk.
Unexpected good elon take. Patents and copyright laws have probably held us back at least 50 years worth in advancements. So much R&D is just solving problems that have already been solved.
Except what he actually wants is for AI companies to be free to slurp whatever they want, but for average joes to still have the book thrown at them for pirating the Adobe suite.
As much as I also would like IP law to die, I do not think that these two saying such means much.
Jack Dorsey is not in government and worth a 100th of what Musk is worth. And Elon Musk is evil and retarded.
