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.”
So delete all pharmaceutical IP to make drugs accessible to everyone and save taxpayers trillions?
“Noooo, not like that!”
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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%.
Lol we all know trump would put pharmaceuticals on the exemption list.
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.
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.
“I don’t think so. Whatever is yours is ours, whatever is ours stays ours. Thank you for understanding.”
—Microsoft et al.
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.
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.
IP law does 3 things that are incredibly important… but have been basically irrelevant between roughly 1995-2023.
- Accurate attribution. Knowing who actually made a thing is super important for the continued development of ideas, as well as just granting some dignity to the inventor/author/creator.
- Faithful reproduction. Historically, bootleg copies of things would often be abridged to save costs or modified to suit the politics of the bootlegger, but would still be sold under the original title. It’s important to know what the canonical original content is, if you’re going to judge it fairly and respond to it.
- Preventing bootleggers from outcompeting original creators through scale.
Digital technology made these irrelevant for a while, because search engines could easily answer #1, digital copies are usually exact copies so #2 was not an issue, and digital distribution made #3 (scale) much more balanced.
But then came AI. And suddenly all 3 of these concerns are valid again. And we’ve got a population who just spent the past 30 years living in a world where IP law had zero upsides and massive downsides.
There’s no question that IP law is due for an overhaul. The question is: will we remember that it ever did anything useful, or will we exchange one regime of fatcats fucking over culture for another one?
How does genai make those concerns valid again?
Make yourself the question: how does genai respect these 3 boundaries set by IP law? All providers of Generative AI services should be forced by law to explicitly estate this.
I’m still not getting it. What does generative AI have to do with attribution? Like, at all.
I can train a model on a billion pictures from open, free sources that were specifically donated for that purpose and it’ll be able to generate realistic pictures of those things with infinite variation. Every time it generates an image it’s just using logic and RNG to come up with options.
Do we attribute the images to the RNG god or something? It doesn’t make sense that attribution come into play here.
I would like to take a crack at this. There is this recent trend going around with ghiblifying one’s picture. Its basically converting a picture into ghibli image. If you had trained it on free sources, this is not possible.
Internally an LLM works by having networks which activate based on certain signals. When you ask it a certain question. It creates a network of similar looking words and then gives it back to you. When u convert an image, you are doing something similar. You cannot form these networks and the threshold at which they activate without seeing copyrighted images from studio ghibli. There is no way in hell or heaven for that to happen.
OpenAI trained their models on pirated things just like meta did. So when an AI produces an image in style of something, it should attribute the person from which it actually took it. Thats not whats happening. Instead it just makes more money for the thief.
I think your understanding of generative AI is incorrect. It’s not just “logic and RNG” It is using training data (read as both copyrighted and uncopyrighted material) to come up with a model of “correctness” or “expectedness”. If you then give it a pattern, (read as question or prompt) it checks its “expectedness” model for whatever should come next. If you ask it “how many cups in a pint” it will check the most common thing it has seen after that exact string of words it in its training data: 2. If you ask for a picture of something “in the style of van gogh”, it will spit out something with thick paint and swirls, as those are the characteristics of the pictures in its training data that have been tagged with “Van Gogh”. These responses are not brand new, they are merely a representation of the training data that would most work as a response to your request. In this case, if any of the training data is copyrighted, then attribution must be given, or at the very least permission to use this data must be given by the current copyright holder.
I’ve decided all of your comments are all mine, I’m feeding them into an AI which approximates you except ends every statement with how stupid and lame it is. It talks a lot about gayness as a side effect of that, in a derogatory manner.
Would you like me to stop?
1&2 solved by digital signature
3 both never happens and when it happens IP laws can’t really stop it
Are we pretending metadata on images and sounds actually work and don’t get scrubbed almost immediately?
They want to do this so they can feed their ai models.
You can tell China is making strides when suddenly IP laws are a nuisance rather than a fundamental value of the American system lol
Our models
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…
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.
I think the best solution would be a much shorter exclusionary period for patents.
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…
that technology never would have existed in the first place
Oh gee, a wildly incorrect assumption
Oh gee, a rational contradiction supported with evidence.
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.
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.
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.
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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
The internet is literally the peak example that proves IP laws are unnecessary for innovation and actually inhibits it. And yes, good observation that IP laws predate the internet. They are antiquated by it and no longer relevant in a post-internet world.
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
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That’s why the Sistine Chapel has the little © 1512 painted in the corner
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…
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. And those companies that build that sort of infrastructure are supported by larger, proprietary companies.
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…
That’s only true of the too few people that control too much resources
Huh?
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.
Read Debt by David Graeber.
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.
No.
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.
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 with no assurance that it won’t be stolen and duplicated by someone else who then sells the same product for a quarter of the price…
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.
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…?
Nobody does anything anymore and we’ll all just die. Gotcha.
Yes that’s totally what I said.
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Talking about “IP” as if it were a single thing confuses any debate. Copyright is not a patent, which is not a trademark - they do different things.
Software patents actually should be deleted. It is impractical to avoid accidentally infringing there are multiple ways to describe the same system using totally different technical descriptions. Copyright for software was enough.
Thank you for the only based take.
IP law is so fractured that individual US states have different laws that can have international implications. It’s a massive hodgepodge that need to be aligned and nationalized.
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.
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.
That conundrum already exists with the current system, though.
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.”
It’s easier just to price in the fee than having to shut down or retool a project.
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.
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.
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.
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).
It’s not a surprise that all these techbros who want to steal everything and feed it into their AI machines without paying a single fucking cent to the original creators all the sudden want to get rid of IP. They can lead by example by submitting their IP into the public domain.
Or maybe they’re just massive frauds?
This is of course after they spent decades consolidating power, wealth and influence with those same IP laws, while snuffing out all smaller competitors.
The speed with which Americas tech CEOs have embraced this new oligarchic system is astounding. It’s almost like that was the plan all along. Almost.
I’m cool with it. I think we should require almost everything to be public domain. But I think those personally contributing to the public domain should be recognized, and no one should be allowed to get rich off of it.
You’re cool with it until you realize that they only want to do this to personally gain from it. And guaranteed will protect their own IP, and the IP of every large corporation.
It’s just that you yourself and small businesses will no longer have the benefit of intellectual property. Megacorps can steal whatever they want with impunity since they are the only true holders of intellectual property.
That sounds good on paper until you look at the long history of these people and how everything they do is entirely focused on their own benefit over that of others. They gain something to win here, guaranteed they aren’t going to let themselves lose on anything either.
It’s the same sort of situation as AI regulation. Sam Altman and openai want the United States to crack down and make it extremely difficult to develop new models. Why? So that they don’t have any competition. They already got their foot in the door they want to close the door for anyone else.
This is very likely the same sort of situation.
Kinda feel like they said something like
“I think everyone should have food”
And you responded with
“you want a Walmart on every block in the world?? do you even know the environmental impact that will have? Poor people are really to blame anyways because they’re not voting with their wallets enough”
How an asshole can mess something up is entirely independent of how a proper implementation might not mess up
Edit to say: I think this is what they meant in their comment about (American) capitalist propaganda; You dont realise your implicit bias enforcing that it must be a capitalist implementing it without any external input.
To the rest of the world he’s just an infamous citizen in a dying country, who would never realistically have 1/10th the pull needed to enforce that BS internationally; by starting the conversation at best he’d speed up external implementations.
You really need to read something that isn’t capitalist propaganda.
Removing copyright entirely is a bridge too far.
Just roll it back to a reasonable time limit (I dunno, 7 years?), and categorically reject all further lobbying attempts from Disney and the like.
This is called being a “reactionary.” You don’t want to drastically change the system in ways that’ll make things better for all. You just want to return to a previous status quo you enjoyed.
I’d like to get back to ‘for limited time’. Patents 10 years, no extensions. Copyright, 10 years, no extensions. Trademarks indefinite as long as the owner still has a meaningful business still operating and using the trademark ( this one is tricky to define well).
It’s still a misguided policy aimed at furthering the lie of individualism. Which why we have so many ridiculous true stories of parallel invention, and scientists racing to the patent office to claim full credit.
These people are building on the works of all those who came before. All should benefit from the results. And all should enjoy a basic standard of living, instead of this cut throat first past this finish line system, where all who fall behind will suffer.
A government stipend to make public art or open source software or literature or whatever sounds pretty great. It’s hard to see how we get there from here. But it’d be great.
France has something like it for artists I think.
A great starting point is guaranteeing a basic standard of living for all. No exceptions.
The libertarians want everything for free. Interesting.
And the second they get it, they reinvent IP law, but in an even more restricted form.
Well now they will just crush opponents via favours from the politicians they directly and openly paid for.
What libertarians? I don’t know much about Dorsey, but Musk doesn’t seem much like a libertarian to me.
You wouldn’t download a car?
I’m not a libertarian and I want everything to be free. If I have an idea on how to make a device that betters the lives of those around me, why the hell would I keep it to myself or try to become rich off it?
The current US trade war is the perfect opportunity for some other country or countries to “right-size” their IP laws.
Hollywood wanted “lifetime plus 900 years” or whatever. So, whenever the US negotiated a trade deal it said “you only get tariff-free access to our markets if you give Hollywood lifetime plus 900 years in your country too.”
With section 1201 of the DMCA this also meant that other countries had to accept that you could only repair your John Deere tractor if you paid Deere for the privilege. Or that HP could prevent you from using any ink but theirs in your printer, allowing them to make printer ink the most expensive liquid on the planet.
If the US is no longer abiding by the terms of their trade agreements, other countries should no longer honor these absurd IP treaties.
Dorsey got fired from his own company by the board for incompetence.
Was that from Bluesky or somewhere else?
twitter. He was fired as ceo in 2008, was brought back, and then again was told to step down by the board or be fired. https://www.axios.com/2021/11/29/jack-dorsey-step-down-twitter-ceo
Yes, I’m fully aware we want to abolish IP law for different reasons but still, I’m onboard.
Musk is out to delete all laws that don’t benefit him, and replace them with harsh private rules that are not accountable to the people.
