A World Without Intellectual Property | Hacker News Reader

A World Without Intellectual Property

mises.org

32 pointssteiger39 comments

Such an esteemed organization should refrain from using false statements to support its stance: Movie makers receive most of their revenues from motion-picture theatres, not DVD sales.

is contradicted by: http://www.allbusiness.com/north-america/united-states-calif... titled: Digital Verite: studios see more money in DVDs than theaters.

And then the article says:

  Spend a few dollars, get a dozen good songs in your possession, or
  Spend the next four hours on the Web trying to find those songs performed by some obscure local artists.

  The answer is obvious.

The answer isn't so obvious. First, you don't get 12 good songs, you get one good song and 11 lousy ones. And yes, most would rather go home and type in the lyrics they heard to figure out what the song and artist is, or simply do without than pay $20 to get one good track.

This is also not exactly correct: For-profit entrepreneurs are able to take a piece of shareware, add useful features, and sell copies with tech support.

And again, a hopeful naivety: Even though you would have the right to call your product Cheerios, grocery stores may refuse to carry your product. Does Mises really think stores care about the consumer? They care about selling stuff. If consumers buy it because it says Cherrios on it, then they'll sell it. Why do grocery stores make their generic brands look so much like the name brands? Because when it has the same color logos and the pills are the same colors and the words look the same, the store makes more profit selling the generics.

Overall, poor showing by Mises on this one.

This article makes sense only if you side with the consumer.

In any society, one must ask, who do we want more of? What do we want more of? Personally, I want more content to consume and I want higher quality content at that.

So, to get more of that, we have to reward the producers of content. If we reward the consumers of content, we'll get more consumers. Do we want more consumers?

And this goes for everyone. We have to reward those who produce OSS and proprietary/commercial software. We need to reward the producers of movies and music -- not just the distributors -- the bands. The artists. The actors. The designers. Not just the big studios.

We need to reward the writers. The programmers, the creators. Not just the factories.

And we definitely don't need to be enabling the consumer to consume even more and destroy the planet even more.

"We need to reward producers more and punish consumers so that Americans will produce more and consume less and rebuild our nation to its previous glory."

That's a very statist way of thinking, which is what Austrian/libertarians are opposed to. No libertarian should care about "rebuilding a nation's glory" because that's the sort of rhetoric heard from authoritarian nations.

It is natural for people to want to consume. The reason people produce is so that they can be able to consume later on. What the article states is that removing patent protection from society (which is in line with removing government interference in business) is feasible, because the originators of content/ideas would still be able to profit by branding and earlier entrance into the marketplace, as opposed to expecting a government-sanctioned monopoly.

More consumers has led to a consumer society in which we are consuming more than we are producing. The American culture is in decline, because we aren't producing anything the world wants. We need to reward producers more and punish consumers so that Americans will produce more and consume less and rebuild our nation to its previous glory. And this goes for everyone. We have to reward those who produce OSS and proprietary/commercial software. We need to reward the producers of movies and music -- not just the distributors -- the bands. The artists. The actors. The designers. Not just the big studios. We need to reward the writers. The programmers, the creators. Not just the factories. And we definitely don't need to be enabling the consumer to consume even more and destroy the planet even more.

3 million MP3s to sniff through is more than enough for my lifetime. If programming services are needed, they will be paid for.

On the other hand, I think the article is trying to show people that it's possible for people to make a living without intellectual property, abiet with poor arguments.

The question is, who makes the living and how? Do you want programmers with brains capable of creating software worth buying to be doing tech support? It's a waste of time for programmers like that to be doing tech support -- they should be programming!

The truth is that creators in our society do not make money. They sometimes make salaries. Sales people make money. Distributors make money. But the creators very often make almost no money.

We need to reward creativity in our nation. We need to reward the people who are clever enough to think of solutions to problems. The consumers are creating problems. We need fewer of those -- both consumers and problems.

So I'm not so sure really if it is possible for creators to make money without intellectual property and I definitely do know that without intellectual property it's easy for consumers to get content without paying anything.

The truth is that creators in our society do not make money. They sometimes make salaries. Sales people make money. Distributors make money. But the creators very often make almost no money.

Entertainment creators, yes. People who solve actual business problems? No.

So I'm not so sure really if it is possible for creators to make money without intellectual property and I definitely do know that without intellectual property it's easy for consumers to get content without paying anything.

Release something in the public domain. Try hard to make money, and report back if it is a success or not.

I don't even care if it is a failure, but I would like to know more data points about the viability of the public domain.

In my field, there has been a few downers/failure in open source game developers trying to make money. One guy eventually succeeded, making 43,000 dollars in the space of a few month. He was already making more money than the rest of would-be game entrepreneurs.

Now, I am making money writing games for a repeat client. My games are also BSD licensed. We'll see how this goes for future projects.

We need to reward producers more and punish consumers so that Americans will produce more and consume less and rebuild our nation to its previous glory.

We need a balance. Rewarding producers and punishing consumers is just as naive as rewarding consumers and punishing producers.

Someone has to buy your product in order for you to make money. Why would you want a market crash when the other nation with a consumer economy goes through the same thing the US is now and demand shrivels up? In order to have an export driven economy, other countries have to run a trade deficit.

It's created by a Mises.org user on a wiki. Of course, somebody who have an account there should fix the claim and the weak arguments.

The whole article seems to be very confused. Especially the section about software has several flaws that leave the impression that the author doesn't have a very deep knowledge on that topic. (The other sections sound more plausible, but I can't judge them because I'm neither an inventor nor a musician nor ...)

Given that predicting the future is almost impossible even for highly specialized experts in their area, it is hard to believe that broad predictions based on sciolism are of any value.

> They might engineer the software to work only with permission from the software firm, requiring the consumer to pay for it.

This is true, but is missing another trend that is more important: Software as a service. Any company providing a paid web service doesn't need to cripple their software with copy protection anymore. Instead, they control the computers on which is software is running.

Missing that option in the article is especially odd because it is the only business model that could work absolutely unchanged if there was no copyright (which was the premise of the article).

> A third option [...] is the open-source freeware/shareware model

What's "the" business model of open source, freeware and shareware? The term "open source" alone comprises lots of different models (dual-licensing, selling "just" service, etc) which are again different from the freeware model and the shareware model.

> or software written by volunteers/hobbyists and made freely available without difficult licensing restrictions.

Here, "no difficult licensing restrictions" is presented in contrast with e.g. "open source" of the enumeration above.

However, it is in fact part of it, for two reasons: First, there is a big movement within the open source scene that exists to minimize the license terms (BSD-style licenses, public domain, etc). Second, software without restrictions fulfills the definition of free software as it obviously permits all 4 essential freedoms.

> For-profit entrepreneurs are able to take a piece of shareware, add useful features, and sell copies with tech support.

Adding useful features to a shareware is quite hard if you don't have the sources, and it's almost never worth the trouble of disassembling and reverse engineering the software.

Withholding the sources is an important component of the shareware model, at least currently, and that is unlikely to change should the copyright be disestablished.

I recently got into a very lengthy argument with a friend of mine about this very issue. I argued that because sharing content is becoming so easy, the ability to protect copyrights and patents will disappear, and at some point we (or the next generation) will decide that it's in the better interest of society to embrace free sharing of ideas and reject the concept of owning information.

There's no doubt that a lot of people will lose jobs over it, and current industries and businesses as we know them will cease to exist, but that doesn't mean the music will stop. If anything, it will remove the people who are creating content just for the money and increase the overall quality of all content, media, and information.

It's going to happen, there's no question about this. It's just amusing to watch people desperately hold onto the old ways. I imagine this is quite like the transition into the industrial age was; fascinating to watch and be a part of.

Not sure I agree. Property rights are maintained through the use of force. I don't think that will ever change.

A historical anecdote from memory:

There was once upon a time, expensive sheetmusics. However, the advent of technologies has allowed sheet musics to thrive. The incumbent companies respond with ever more forces, to the point of making the police raid pirates' distribution center.

However, the police eventually give up and move on to other things. Thus, end the sheet music wars and expensive sheet musics were never seen again.

With the internet and encryption, eventually only an all-encompassing police state will be able to prevent copying.

we (or the next generation) will decide that it's in the better interest of society to embrace free sharing of ideas and reject the concept of owning information

Um... what? Can you clarify what you mean by "information"? In the Physical sense, everything is information. I know you don't intend to be that literal, but it sounds like you're proposing that we totally do away with property rights.

I don't want to speak for the parent, but in my opinion, there is a clean separation between matter (ultimately consisting of atoms) and the information embodied in the arrangement of those atoms (eg in a book or DVD disk).

In this scheme, property rights would protect the atoms themselves, but not the information of how they are distributed.

I don't know what it would mean to regard the atoms themselves, without reference to their surroundings, as information, as you seem to imply.

I mean anything that can be copied without destroying or removing the original.

Not sure about this. To analyze the future of so many industries without IP law in a few sentences is asking for a bunch of angry comments. Take Movies, for example: I'm pretty sure I won't be going to movie theaters nearly as often if I could just stream HD to my gorgeous TV.

Software is also controversial. Google works by hiding their code in the datacenters, you can't just copy it. Microsoft works by compiling their code into binaries, and the only workable model for OSS has been support, which isn't very sexy/scalable business model.

To be fair, Mises.org put their content empire under the creative common attribution, have PDFs for people to download for free, and at some point seek people with bit torrent expertise. They also managed to sell books at the same time.

They don't fight technological changes, they embrace it.

Realize that the LvMI didn't just go anti-IP in one day. It takes years of debate for them to change their mind about stuff. That's important, because you don't see major libertarian think tanks change their mind everyday. When they do change their mind, it probably mean that a lot of people change their mind.

Once you got people who have their mind changed, then they will do stuff like start business models not based on IP. That in turn could mean something improtant for the broader economy as a whole. It might mean intensified competition as the anti-IP people starts eating IP supporters' lunch.

There is a difference between IP and trade secrets. MS relies on IP, while Google relies on trade secrets.

IP is illegitimate because each concept exists in effectively infinite supply, and therefore cannot be owned anymore than the Pythagorean theorem or the color blue can be owned. _Access_ to a concept, however, can theoretically be owned, since access can only be gained through physical channels (books, bandwidth, oration, etc.), which are inherently limited in volume. Google limits the “supply” of _access_ to its code, while MS (tries to) limit the “supply” of the code itself.

So closed source could still exist in an IP-free world. There’d be nothing to stop people from distributing binaries freely, of course, but there’d also be nothing to stop anyone from concealing the source as a trade secret.

From the article:

    There are many good reasons to completely repeal
    patents and copyright laws:  they are too complex
    to be understood or obeyed by anybody except a highly
    trained Intellectual Property (IP) attorney[...]

Some parts of copyright law, that most people won't ever come anywhere near having to deal with, are complex. The 99.99% that covers what most people do is pretty easy to understand: if you didn't create that song or movie you just copied, don't give away the copy, and don't take copies from people who are not obeying this rule.

    Musicians could still get paid, even without
    copyright.  They would still be able to sell
    concert tickets, even if they did not make a
    thin dime from CDs and MP3 downloads.

What about musicians whose music does not work well in concert? What about bands like Pink Floyd whose stage shows lost money--they relied on album sales for their money. What about songwriters?

    Of course, people would still buy CDs, even
    with unrestricted file sharing networks in place.
    If you hear a CD being played in a store, and you
    like it, what are you going to do:

        Spend a few dollars, get a dozen good songs
        in your possession, or

        Spend the next four hours on the Web trying
        to find those songs performed by some obscure
        local artists.

    The answer is obvious.

There are two fatal flaws with that argument.

1. It's not going to take four hours on the web. Right now, it might take four hours on the web to find the songs, because we have IP laws so that sites that want to offer the songs have to operate outside the law. That necessarily causes there to be some difficulty in finding and using them.

In the proposed IP-free world of the article, that barrier goes away. Finding the songs on the web will take minutes, not hours.

2. Yes, some people will still prefer a CD--even if they can find the songs on the web in minutes, and they will prefer to buy a CD rather than burn their own from downloads. Even if that is a significant number of people, will those people buy CDs from the artist? In the article's IP-free world, anyone can make and sell CDs. You'd be able to go down to your local CD store and find a third party copy of the "official" CD, complete with all the artwork, liner notes, etc., for cheaper than the official CD.

We are not talking out a pain free process here. In the proposed system Pink Floyd would at the very least go into debt, dedicated songwriters would likely cease in exist in the form we see them today. Change is painful, but in the long run stagnation will kill us far more surely.

There are two factors that I think come into play in any discussion about dumping IP protections. I don't think treating everything as a trade secret is really that viable of an option; there are too many ways to reverse engineer things.

First, what will happen to industries that require significant investments before any return can be realized? Software does not fit in this category any more (perhaps it did at one time), but biotech, green, and space certainly do. If you need to dump $200M to get something right, then somebody else can come reproduce it for $10M in reverse engineering, your screwed. Who would invest in that space?

Second, would people really pay for "shareware" content? Would they pay enough to keep good authors writing books, good film makers making movies, and good musicians making music? Sure, there are a lot of crappy people in those categories getting paid today, but there are also a lot of really good artists getting paid today. If payment was optional (and with no IP protection, payment is optional), how many people would pay?

The first actually bothers me more than the second. I bet JJ Abrams could get enough donations before making a film to make it worth his while, so, while the arts would change, it would probably be OK in the end (after some painful times for all, including consumers). I'm not so sure that SpaceX could get enough donations (that is, after all what they might be) to build a space program.

Software might be cheap to produce monetary wise, but they require tons of developer time to develop.

Beside, 10 million dollars reverse engineering might not produce what you're looking for. It might require more time to perfect the copy technologies.

The one thing I feel people often forget is that the idea of a patent (i.e. a government mechanism for providing an incentive for inventors to share innovations with the rest of the world) is a good one.

I think that the existing implementation of the idea and where it has lead has numerous problems, but the fact of the matter is that it is beneficial for a society to have mechanisms like patents in place.

The article argues that things would still be done, which is true, but in the case of inventions, the problem is that they wouldn't be shared and companies would probably work hard to obscure any innovations that they did make to make it harder for competitors to copy them.

The argument for getting rid of trademarks is also kinda weak. The end user should be able to easily understand what it is they are buying. You shouldn't have to worry that some sneaky guy is selling cow manure in a box and calling it cheerios.

Beyond that, the point that removing IP restrictions everywhere else would only have a positive effect is something that I tend to agree with.

It has been a problem for centuries. At what point do we stop experimenting with various schema for patents and realize that is not working?

Theories that work on paper but turn out to be wrong in reality are just bad theories and should be rejected.

It's not just on paper. In my own experience I have gotten a lot of utility out of researching old patents (I do aluminum anodizing as a hobby and found detailed descriptions of stripping solutions in patents).

Society needs a system to ensure that innovations are not lost. Abolishing it is in someways similar to the idea of abolishing scientific publications. If you do that, how will breakthroughs be communicated to future generations? Or are you saying that having such a mechanism in place is a bad thing?

Just because a problem is hard and a solution hasn't been found doesn't mean that the idea motivating it is flawed.

It is established as a fact that patents are beneficial for society?

Heh, please find me those studies that establish this 'fact' by empirical means[]. You will find a few that says that says that it is a good idea for a company to get a patent if there is such a system, but noone claimed otherwise.

[] Empirical since you can get whatever results you want in economics depending on how your model of the world looks like.

For a rather more in-depth argument, the Mises Institute also published this 70-page book/essay: http://mises.org/store/Against-Intellectual-Property-P523.as... (PDF: http://mises.org/books/against.pdf)

If you're truly interested in this question, you should read Against Intellectual Monopoly, available for purchase here[0] and reading for free online here[1]. It's written by two professors from Cambridge? It's the most thorough discussion of intellectual property law I've ever read.

0: http://www.amazon.com/Against-Intellectual-Monopoly-Michele-...

1: http://www.micheleboldrin.com/research/aim.html

The author conveniently forgets the farmaceutic industry. There, billions need to be invested to find a drug and thoroughly document it's effects and how to make it. The production cost of the drug is only a fraction of the research. This would lead to a very big decrease in the number of new drugs appearing

...and the pharmaceutic industry also spends more money on marketing and advertising than they do on research.

I'm not so sure they would be worse off without IP protection either.

Very few new drugs have appeared in recent times as it is.

I just don't understand the gall of people who want to take what isn't theirs to take. There's plenty of copyright-free work/art they could make do with, but for some reason they're not content with that.

You really have the gall yourself to say that in a world where you can't as much as sing Happy Birthday to your child without violating copyright.

You would put fish into a tank with barbed or poisoned food and blame them for dying not sticking to the safe food.

You might have a point if I had a reasonable choice of not sending my children to a public school which teaches them the poisoned memes, eliminating free broadcasts of corrupt (aka copyrighted) content, etc. fighting the poison in other ways, but in America, corporatism is God, so it only works the other way, doing whatever it takes to hook our children on corrupt themes that will make money for the corporations even if free alternatives would have done just as well.

If you are going to spout naiveté, then the opposite extreme sounds more attractive. If they didn't want it copied, why did they broadcast it in the first place. If they don't publish it, then no one will "take" it.

But you want to have it both ways, on the one hand use public ideas with just a twist that you can poison with copyright and use to make money, make it popular and embed it into everyone's public spaces and minds, and on the other hand, retain tight control over what these people who have been polluted with it can do with it, when it has become part of them and their thought processes.

This is corruption, pure and simple. There should be no place for governmental policing of thought in America just to satisfy corporate greed.

New fallacy alert: appeal to brainwashing. If I recognise someone has created something I recognise it as their property and choose to only use it in line with their permission or not use it at all. If my friend plays a song he just wrote I don't turn around and sell it to the world or release it P2P against his wish. Why is it people like you always revert to the brainwashing argument whenever individual choice becomes a problem for your argument.

We have rights to our work, that is clear. the nature of our existence requires it.

you must be able to keep others from taking the results of your efforts. If, for example, you could not improve a piece of property and keep the benefits for yourself, our modern society or even a primitive agricultural one would not be possible.

Our work takes many forms and so does the nature of rights associated with it. But one thing is clear. If people will not do a kind of work we value without having their rights to the results protected, than it is necessary to do so.

But we should not hand out rights if "we" aren't getting something of real value in return.

One problem is that "we" the people have far too little say about how our interests are defined and promoted by the lobbyists who have the most influence over what government does. The collective right to make such deals with innovators has been captured by private interests.

Also worth pointing out is the fact that length of time one retains a right to intellectual property influences how many works are created.

Handing out rights for 70 years for literary work probably doesn't get us any more benefit than limiting them to 25 years. Writers don't really decide whether to create based on such long term considerations, so why should we give it away for nothing in return?

On the other hand, if we make the period too short, a lot fewer works would be created.

90% of the works created are crap anyway.

If people will not do a kind of work we value without having their rights to the results protected, than it is necessary to do so.

Perhaps. Would people stop making music, stop writing, stop inventing if we removed IP protections?

some would and some wouldn't. I think those producing things of lasting value probably would continue. Their lives would be much more difficult though. And that doesn't seem very fair.

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