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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

This is disgusting. I recognize that the moat that the government provides via the nonsense system that is IP is an incentive for investment, but the very notion of intellectual property should fly in the face of the moral code of every single person who works at a business built on Linux or HTTP.

The future the Earth needs is only delayed by these moats of who-can-use-which-research.

You don’t own your discoveries or ideas, any more than you can own a song that you sing to another person. The moment something leaves your head, that information is no longer yours—it enriches the whole world, and that is how it should be.

I am the staunchest defender of property rights—but information can never be property.

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> information can never be property

Property is an artificial construct, it's up to society how we define what property is and how laws protect it. In this case, Google and Waymo are literally building fake cities to create this IP. That money needs to come from somewhere or that research won't happen, and a temporary monopoly on the IP it generates seems like a fair trade-off for society.

Property is not an artificial construct; it is a natural right. You must physically harm me to remove that which is inside of my closed fist.

Intellectual Property, however, is made-up fairytale nonsense.

How many of your belongings can you hold in your closed fist?

It's not obvious to me that property beyond one's own homestead would be considered a natural right rather than a "made up" right, but I'm willing to be convinced. Are you advocating a Lockean theory of property?

By that reasoning, if I take something of yours, then it's mine now. That is called "finders keepers" or "adverse possession".

Really? As an extreme example, if it costs $1B for a company to develop some IP (1000 people working for 5-6 years) that IP should just be freely shareable?

Spend can't really be the reason a company gets a public good, right? If I want to own a city park, and I spend a bunch of money trying to own it, that doesn't mean I do, in fact, own it or should own it.

Society should give (or "lend", in the case of a patent) a public good to a private entity if and only if the societal benefit outweighs the societal loss of giving out the good. Maybe your argument was shorthand for something along those lines, but I think it's important to distinguish.

That seems like a poor analogy, if you mean the park already exists and the company is just trying to take possession of it. In this situation, there is no park at the outset, and the company would have no incentive to build one if it didn't have some way to benefit from it once built. Companies will only create this kind of IP if they can profit from it; they're not charities. If we as a society want this IP to exist, our only options are to protect the profit motive that leads to its private creation, or (like the park!) fund it publicly.

Or, perhaps being the first to develop a new technique is actually a sufficient competitive advantage to fund the research. This is surely true in many cases where a first mover advantage is large. If you look closely, I think you'll find the research costs in many areas that are prone to making this argument (drugs) are not nearly as large a component of the company's costs as you think.

I'm not sure I agree. Let's take "cure for cancer" as a theoretical thing that can be accomplished with $nB in research spending.

What is the incentive for companies to spend their resources trying to find a solution for this if society can effectively nationalize the results as soon as they are obtained? If a company cannot recoup their investment (and their risk) then they're not going to spend the resources in the first place.

It's far better for public institutions to have well funded research programs for "IP" that serves the public good. If companies get there first, by all means "lend" them the patent (as long as the "loan" expires after a reasonable period of time.) This is largely the system that we have today, and while not perfect in many respects it does ensure that both public and private entities are chasing big goals.

> Spend can't really be the

> reason a company gets a

> public good, right? If I

> want to own a city park,

> and I spend a bunch of money

> trying to own it, that

> doesn't mean I do, in fact,

> own it or should own it.

Isn't the error here assuming that the IP invented by the private entity is automatically a public good?

To me a public park is not equal to IP invented with private funds.

Well stated but I think you're wrong, although I can't articulate why, so I'll upvote in the hope that somebody else will adequately refute.

That only works when you have a way to ensure that people who invent things have a way to make a living. Most people working on open source do it as volunteers; only a few have it as part of their job, and the ecosystem suffers.

Deep research requires investment or public funding. If you can get congress to fund it, then more power to you - but until then, people have to make a living from invention.

so you'd be alright with someone stealing something you spent billions to discover through R&D? Who would invest money into R&D if a competitor could just steal it for free?

It’s not stealing. Maybe you are who they were addressing when they asserted that “You wouldn’t download a car.”

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