>"For myself, the big fraud is getting public to believe that Intellectual Property was a moral principle and not just effective BS to justify corporate rent seeking."
If anything, I'm glad people are finally starting to wake up to this fact.
Most people here would be interested in Rob Pike's opinion. What you quote is from someone commenting on Rob's post.
The way that Rob's opinion here is deflected, first by focusing on the fact that he got a spam mail and then this misleading quote ("myself" does not refer to Rob) is very sad.
The spam mail just triggered Rob's opinion (the one that normal people are interested in).
Dont try to tell us what we are choosing to focus on. Everything in the message from Pike and the comments below his post are relevant. There was no assumption in my mind that this was all about Pike.
Please don't reinterpret my comment. I didn't say anything about what you're focusing on. I made the simple and clear point that clicking on Pike's name leads to an unattributed quotation that (it turns out) isn't from Pike.
Neither take is correct. When correctly applied it can be an effective tool to encourage certain sorts of intellectual endeavors by making them monetarily favorable. When incorrectly applied it leads to dysfunction as is the case for most regulatory regimes.
Any tool can be used by a wrongdoer for evil. Corporations will manipulate the regulator in order to rent seek using whatever happens to be available to them. That doesn't make the tools themselves evil.
> When correctly applied it can be an effective tool to encourage certain sorts of intellectual endeavors by making them monetarily favorable
This has been empirically disproven. China experimented with having no enforced Intellectual Property laws, and the result was that they were able to do the same technological advancement it took the West 250 years to do and surpass them in four decades.
Intellectual Property law is literally a 6x slowdown for technology.
China was playing industrial catch up. They didn't have to (for example) reinvent semiconductors from first principles. They will surely support some form of IP law once they have been firmly established at the cutting edge for a while.
I'm no fan of the current state of things but it's absurd to imply that the existence of IP law in some form isn't essential if you want corporations to continue much of their R&D as it currently exists.
Without copyright in at least some limited form how do you expect authors to make a living? Will you have the state fund them directly? Do you propose going back to a patronage system in the hopes that a rich client just so happens to fund something that you also enjoy? Something else?
> China was playing industrial catch up. They didn't have to (for example) reinvent semiconductors from first principles. They will surely support some form of IP law once they have been firmly established at the cutting edge for a while.
That argument was in vogue about 20 years ago, but it fell out of favor when China passed us on the most important technologies without slowing down.
It is funny that some people are still carrying the torch for it after it's been so clearly disproven.
I agree they’ve surpassed the west (or at least stopped solely playing catch up) in some areas.
But surely you can see how your upthread math of “250 years in 40 years” has a mix of mostly catch-up and replication and a sliver of novel innovation at the extreme tail end of that 250 year span?
I agree that the China experiment hasn't empirically disproven IP law for the reasons you go in it. And this thread has hit the usual problem that "IP laws" are very broad and cover everything from basic common sense around trademarks to the lunacy like the Amazon one-click patent.
But at issue here is there are IP laws that slow progress it should sit with the proponents of those laws to demonstrate that they are effective. And I don't see how anyone could come up with evidence for that - it is nearly impossible to prove that purposefully and artificially retarding progress actually speeds progress up. There are a lot of other factors at play and one of them is probably a more important factor than IP law. Odds are that putting artificial obstacles in the way of making sensible commercial decisions just slows everything down for no gain.
And kills the culture, it is sad the amount of cultural artefacts in the 1900s that have basically been strangled by IP laws. My family used to be part of a community choir before the copyright lawyers got to it.
Copying and innovating are two very different things; most of China' s innovation has been incremental, to be kind. To keep up, the machine still needs to copy. Just like Japan did for decades until it became an industrial behemoth, so give them 10 more years and soon enough the western world will be doing the copying
If you are actually asking a serious question: while a patron is primarily motivated by whatever catches his interest, a corporate conglomerate funding the same investments is motivated by profit. They would have more of a motive to select the kind of investments that will succeed and pay for themselves, allowing for a more economically efficient allocation of resources.
Of course, the kind of investments that might succeed and pay for themselves may not necessarily be the kind that is most beneficial to the public at large - but the same applies to the patron.
As you say, conglomerates being profit motivated tend to produce largely uninteresting slop. See the vast majority of the movie industry.
Patrons will produce some very interesting and detailed work but it will not necessarily align with your tastes and there will probably not be all that much of it. European history makes this clear enough (imo).
A system in which individual or very small groups of creators are able to produce work of their own choice that appeals to a small to moderately sized niche of their choosing seems like it should produce the best outcome from the perspective of the typical individual. Fiction books are a decent example of this. We get lots of at least decent quality work because a single author can feasibly produce something "on credit" and recoup the costs after the fact.
A perfect illustration of why IP should never be regarded as a moral right. It exists for the benefit of society as a whole. Thus the laws creating it need to be tuned with that as the explicit (and only) goal. Mickey Mouse law must not be permitted.
Well during prehistoric times (1960's) The Flintstones had Zippo lighters that rubbed two tiny sticks together to light their Winston cigarettes. The tobacco brand of their major sponsor.
Naturally that could never have been legitimate until the patent on the Zippo had expired ;)
> China experimented with having no enforced Intellectual Property laws, and the result was that they were able to do the same technological advancement it took the West 250 years to do and surpass them in four decades.
Are you seriously ignoring the fact that China wasn't developing new technology, but rather utilizing already-existing technology? Of course it took 6x less time!
Were those 249 years produced in a vacuum? Or did they stand on 1500 years of mathematics and trial-and- error?
As a quick example, think of a high-end digital photographic camera; you can certainly highlight the major tech advancements that make it high end, but do you know how the screws were produced? Where the grease used on the gears cone from? How long did it take to get to the state-of-the-art optics? How can you even get composite materials to perform heavy-duty cycles?
Those 249 years of tech were based on the previous 249 years of tech, and so on and so on. That is how it works. Nothing you have "today" comes from a vacuum.
Not just China but almost all of the world. We have parity in most countries right now. The whole point of the WTO was to do technology transfer and allow the US to double down on high margin, finance parts of business since the manufacturing game had the low fruit all picked and wasn’t valuable property anymore. The exception for the west would be to specialize on optics and silicon, two places China is still far behind.
Which part do you think I'm lying about- that China experimented with having no enforced Intellectual Property laws or that they industrialized six times faster than the west?
That is a somewhat broad claim that needs decomposing. I would agree that Chinese EV industry is quite more advanced in terms of manufacturing processes and cost optimization, but that is not "technically" more advanced per se, its just a reflection of a culture. Maybe the salt batteries will be a breakthrough, but at least for me it has been difficult finding reliable data on it; Other than that, afaik (and from a layman perspective) there isn't anything inherently superior in chinese EV vehicles from a technological perspective, when compared to western counterparts. Cheaper, yes. But thats about it.
> When correctly applied it can be an effective tool to encourage certain sorts of intellectual endeavors by making them monetarily favorable.
I agree, but the only worth candidate I see is the medical industry.
And given that drug development is so expensive because of government-mandated trials, I think it makes sense for the government to also provide a helping hand here — to counterweight the (completely sensible) cost increase due to the drug trial system.
> When incorrectly applied it leads to dysfunction as is the case for most regulatory regimes.
The second it became cheaper to not apply it, every state under the sun chose not to apply it. Whether we're talking about Chinese imports that absolutely do not respect copyright, trademark, even quality, health and warranty laws ... and nothing was done. Then, large scale use of copyrighted by Search provider (even pre-Google), Social Networks, and others nothing was done. Then, large scale use for making AI products (because these AI just wouldn't work without free access to all copyrighted info). And, of course, they don't put in any effort. Checking imports for fakes? Nope. Even checking imports for improperly produced medications is extremely rarely done. If you find your copyright violated on a large scale on Amazon, your recourse effectively is to first go beg Amazon for information on sellers (which they have a strong incentive not to provide) and then go run international court cases, which is very hard, very expensive, and in many cases (China, India) totally unfair. If you get poisoned from a pill your national insurance bought from India, they consider themselves not responsible.
Of course, this makes "competition" effectively a tax-dodging competition over time. And the fault for that lies entirely with the choice of your own government.
Your statement about incorrect application only makes sense if "regulatory regimes" aren't really just people. Go visit your government offices, you'll find they're full of people. People who purposefully made a choice in this matter.
A choice to enforce laws against small entities they can easily bully, and to not do it on a larger scale.
To add insult to injury, you will find these choices were almost never made by parliaments, but in international treaties and larger organizations like the WTO, or executive powers of large trade blocks.
> People who purposefully made a choice in this matter.
I am convinced most people never had or ever will have this choice actively. Considering pillarisation (this is not a misspelling) was already a thing in most political systems well before the advent of mass media and digital media it only got worse with it, effectively making choices for people, into the effective hands of few people, influenced by even less people. Those people in the government you mention do not make the choices, they have to act on them as I read it.
You're trying to analyze an entirely different game played by an entirely different set of players by the same set of rules. It's a contextual error on your part. The decision to recognize or not recognize a given body of rules held by an opposing party on the international level is an almost entirely separate topic.
> A choice to enforce laws against small entities they can easily bully, and to not do it on a larger scale.
That's a systemic issue, AKA the bad regulatory regime that I previously spoke of. That isn't some inherent fault of the tool. It's a fault of the regulatory regime which applies that tool.
Kitchen knives are absolutely essential for cooking but they can also be used to stab people. If someone claimed that knives were inherently tools of evil and that people needed to wake up to this fact, would you not consider that rather unhinged?
> To add insult to injury, you will find these choices were almost never made by parliaments, but in international treaties and larger organizations like the WTO, or executive powers of large trade blocks.
That's true, and it's a problem, but it (again) has nothing to do with the inherent value of IP as a concept. It isn't even directly related to the merits of the current IP regulatory regime. It's a systemic problem with the lawmaking process as a whole. Solve the systemic problem and you can solve the downstream issues that resulted from it. Don't solve it and the symptoms will persist. You're barking up the wrong tree.
We want to encourage intellectual endeavors that are desirable to society as a whole but which otherwise face barriers. Making them monetarily favorable is an easy way to accomplish that. Similar to how not speeding is made monetarily favorable, or serving in the military is made monetarily favorable, etc. Surely you don't object to the government using monetary incentives to indirectly shape society? The historical alternatives have been rather brutal.
Right I think we all understand the idea here, its not a misunderstanding. I just think people, reasonably, don't actually see the mechanism working.
It's weird to lump ever other possible idea in one category. These are complex issues with ever changing contexts. The surface of the problem is huge! Surely with anything else we wouldn't be so tunnel visioned, we wouldn't just say: "well we simply _must_ discount everything else, so we can only be happy with what we got." It would literally sound absurd in any other context, but because we are trained to politicize thinking outside of market mechanisms, we see very smart people saying ridiculous things!
Not at all? It's reasonable to point out issues with the implementation as it currently stands (those are abundant and blindingly obvious). However it is also clear that the underlying mechanism works extremely well. A claim to the contrary is quite extraordinary.
Sometimes people do talk about alternatives. State funding and patronage are two of the most common. Both have very obvious drawbacks in terms of quantity and who gets influence over the outcome. Both also have interesting advantages that are well worth examining.
That seems to be the standard argument, "Sure, not everything is ideal but look at longevity & all the cool toys we have now thanks to [money|billionaires|fossil fuels|etc]".
I am with you 100%. The phrase “intellectual property” is an oxymoron. Intellect and Property are opposite things. Worse, the actual truth of intellectual property laws is not, “I’m an artist who got rich”. It is, “I ended up selling my property to a corporation and got screwed.”
The web is for public use. If you don’t want the public, which includes AI, to use it, don’t put it there.
The concept of intellectual property on its own (independently of its legal implementation details) is at most as evil as property ownership, and probably less so as unlike the latter it promotes innovation and creativity.
Despite the apparent etymological contrast, “copyright” is neither antithetical to nor exclusive with “copyleft”: IP ownership, a degree of control over own creation’s future, is a precondition for copyleft (and the OSS ecosystem it birthed) to exist in the first place.
> unlike the latter it promotes innovation and creativity.
Does it though?
I know that people who like intellectual property and money say it does, but people who like innovation and creativity usually tend to think otherwise.
3D printers are a great example of something where IP prevented all innovation and creativity, and once the patent expired the innovation and creativity we've enjoyed in the space the last 15 years could begin.
Yes. The alternative is that everyone spams the most popular brands instead of making their own creations. Both can be abused, but I see more good here than in the alternative.
Mind you, this is mostly for creative IP. We can definitely argue for technical patents being a different case.
>but people who like innovation and creativity usually tend to think otherwise.
People who like innovation and creativity still might need to commission or sell fan art to make ends meet. That's already a gray area for IP.
I think that's why this argument always rubs me strangely. In a post scarcity world, sure. People can do and remix and innovate as they want. We're not only not there, but rapidly collapsing back to serfdom with the current trajectory. Creativity doesn't flourish when you need to spend your waking life making the elite richer.
Property is a local low - it applies to a thing that exists in one place. Intellectual property is trying to apply similar rules to stuff that happen remotely - a text is not a thing, and controlling copying might work in some technological regimes while in others would require totalitarian control. When you extend these rules to cover not just copying of texts but also at the level of ideas it gets even worse.
>The concept of intellectual property on its own (independently of its legal implementation details) is at most as evil as property ownership, and probably less so as unlike the latter it promotes innovation and creativity.
This is a strange inversion. Property ownership is morally just in that the piece of land my home is can only be exclusive, not to mention necessary to a decent life. Meanwhile, intellectual property is a contrivance that was invented to promote creativity, but is subverted in ways that we're only now beginning to discover. Abolish copyright.
>the piece of land my home is can only be exclusive, not to mention necessary to a decent life
That mentality is exactly why you can argue property ownership being more evil. Landlords "own property" and see the reputation of that these past few decades.
Allowing private ownership of limited human necessities like land leads to greed that cost people lives. That's why heavy regulation is needed. Meanwhile, it's at worst annoying and stifling when Disney owns a cartoon mouse fotlr 100 years.
>Allowing private ownership of limited human necessities like land leads to greed that cost people lives.
You're not "allowing" it unless you've already decided that you own it and can dispose of it (or not) as you see it. And this is why you'll always be the enemy of all decent folk.
"Real communism's never been tried!!!!"
>Meanwhile, it's at worst annoying and stifling when Disney owns a cartoon mouse fotlr 100 years.
It's actually destructive of culture in ways that are difficult to overstate. Disney nor any other "copyright owner" can't be trusted to preserve culture and works, they're the ones that threw the old film reels into the river and let them burn up in archive fires. No thanks. It's amazing how wrong you are on every single point.
Well, you could agree not to be a rabid communist hellbent on destroying everything, and we kind of muddle through this the way we've been doing. Or, you eventually work up the nerve to do the violent revolution thing. And then people like me respond.
Property ownership is ultimately based on scarcity. If I using a thing prevents others from using that thing, there is scarcity, and there should be laws protecting it.
There is no scarcity with intellectual property. My ability to have or act on an idea is in no way affected by someone else having the same idea. The entire concept of ownership of an idea is dystopian and moronic.
I also strongly disagree with the notion that it inspires creativity. Can you imagine where we would be if IP laws existed when we first discovered agriculture, or writing, or art? IP law doesn’t stimulate creation, it stifles it.
In early societies authorship was implicitly recognized. If you invented something cool, all of the dozen people you know most likely knew you did it; me trying to pass it as my own would be silly since anyone would see through it and laugh me out of the cave.
It’s not unlike theft, murder, etc.—when societies grow, their ways of dealing with PvP harm (blood feud, honour culture, sacrifice, etc.) can’t scale sufficiently (or have other drawbacks), and that’s when there is a need to codify certain behaviours and punishments in law.
(I wouldn’t claim that respective legal code is perfect and implementation-wise it’s all good today—but to say “there was no law against X back when we lived in tribes and didn’t have writing, therefore we shouldn’t need that law now” seems a bit ridiculous, unless you propose that we drastically and fundamentally reconfigure human communities in a number of ways.)
The concept of IP law only really started to be a thing a couple hundred years ago, and the vast majority of IP law has been created in the last century. Human societies have been large and complex without the concept of IP law most of their history.
confusing any law with "moral principles" is a pretty naive view of the world.
Many countries base some of their laws on well accepted moral rules to make it easier to apply them (it's easier to enforce something the majority of the people want enforced), but the vast majority of the laws were always made (and maintained) to benefit the ruling class
Yeah I see where you are going with this, but I think he was trying to make a point about being convinced by decree. It tended to get people to think that it should be moral.
Also I disagree with the context of what the purpose is for law. I don't think its just about making it easier to apply laws because people see things in moralistic ways. Pure Law, which came from the existence of Common Law (which relates to whats common to people) existed within the frame work of whats moral. There are certain things, which all humans know at some level are morally right or wrong regardless of what modernity teaches us. Common laws were built up around that framework. There is administrative law, which is different and what I think you are talking about.
IMHO, there is something moral that can be learned from trying to convince people that IP is moral, when it is, in fact, just a way to administrate people into thinking that IP is valid.
I don't think this is about being confused out of naivety. In some parts of the western world the marketing department has invested heavily in establishing moral equivalence between IP violation and theft.
Waking up to the fact that the largest corporations in the world are stealing off everyday people to sell a subscription to their theft driven service?
If anything, I'm glad people are finally starting to wake up to this fact.