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this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
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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."
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?
All these indie games disrupting the gaming industry, gone. Game dev takes a lot of time and money, guess big companies will be the only ones who can afford to do it. The indie guy trying to sell his game for 5$ will be buried by a company that steals it and dumps a few hundred K into it to make a better version and the original creator is left with nothing.
People think about getting an the stuff from companies for free and forget that big companies would benefit most with no protection to the little guy. There is a reason why the rich want to do this, honestly think about it.
The rich want to do it because of AI. That's it.
They can already take whatever you create wihout giving you a dime. What are you gonna do, sue a multi-billion dollar company with a fleet of attorneys on standby? With what money?
They would certainly just settle and give you a pittance just about large enough to cover your attorney fees.
Do you know why companies usually don't do this? Because they have sufficiently many people hired who do nothing but create stories for the company full time. They do not need your ideas.
Copyright didn't exist for millenia. It didn't stop authors from writing books.
Small companies have defend themselves from Apple. People make money from their inventions and writings. There are tons of examples. You're creating this idea of unbeatable huge corpos that isn't true. They don't always win, you can easily prove with with a 1 minute Google search.
They also don't want it just because of AI, this would enable them to steal and mass produce any IP anyone makes. This includes physical inventions.
Also copyright didn't exist for a long time and neither did the Internet or global trade. Times change. We went millennia without many things, it doesn't automatically make them wrong or bad. What a silly basis.
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.
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.
Capitalism stifles innovation
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.
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?