No Copyright Law: The Real Reason for Germany’s Industrial Expansion? (2010)

Also glad he didn't patent it.

https://www.ige.ch/en/about-us/the-history-of-the-ipi.html

Maybe what changed in 1907 was that French patents were protected as well?

Germany and the United States put (tarriffs) pressure on Switzerland and the turn of the century, forcing them to protect their patents in Switzerland. They unhappily obliged after years of talks and trade issues - in 1907.

PS: specifically chemical patents

> In the UK, he was called "Slater the Traitor"[2] because he brought British textile technology to America, modifying it for United States use. He memorized the designs of textile factory machinery as an apprentice to a pioneer in the British industry before migrating to the United States at the age of 21.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater

The author of that article is this fella [0]. While I do not doubt his writing abilities, I do doubt his expertise in economics and his political motivations.

Simply put, I do not show up at X field and pretend to know things just because I think I’m smart, even if I don’t have anything to do with said field. It’s interesting how with economics everyone thinks they can do just as much.

If you would like a basic intro to free markets checkout Milton Friedman’s Free To Choose series on YouTube. It’s from the 80s but well worth the time investment. It’s an easy to understand documentary series and at the end he talks to a group of people about the subject shown.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pankaj_Mishra

I also think of government support for industry as orthogonal to free trade. Yes, countries have certainly sped up their development through the use of tariffs. By transferring money from consumers to people accumulating capital they increased the effective savings rate of the country and increase growth. But you can also literally just tax consumers and pass the money on to industrialists in the form of cheap loans like the Japanese did in their development. They didn't go off the gold standard until the Great Depression but I'm sure you could industrialize through fiat currency too though no cases come immediately to mind.

I'm not entirely happy telling current poor countries "Suffer now so your grandchildren can be rich" even it that's what my ancestors did for me. And I'm certainly not going to advocate the sort of violent labor movement suppression that seems to have always gone hand in hand with rapid industrialization[1]. I suspect that a lot of truths about the world are going to change as AI develops over the next half century so I feel like I shouldn't be advocating sacrifices I'm not sure will pay off.

[1]https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/

>What's interesting is that the same basic dynamic likely applies to even highly developed economics.

is not

The assumption that South America and Africa are pro free trade is not true. Indeed, most of the countries with the highest tariffs are in Africa.

https://www.tutor2u.net/economics/blog/which-countries-have-...

Marx used this a lot 200 years ago.

Office suites just don't build for Linux. Mainly because the people buying are not there, I would wager. For personal, I still loathe most.

Games, it's true. But the same situation. Luckily, I don't do 3d shooters anymore. Steam mostly works. Otherwise, most of my game time is on the PS4.

Yes. The article and the parent regard industrial benefits.

Most of the propriety alternatives that you mention derive a great deal of their value from networked capabilities, made possible due to the proliferation of GNU+Linux on servers.

In this way, the availability of GNU+Linux without traditional copyright restrictions has been a huge boon to the commercial software industry, just as the availablity of printed knowledge without traditional copyright restrictions was a huge boon to various German industries.

No one is arguing that unfunded projects will kick the ass of funded ones. However, innovation that can be shared will produce more innovation.

Much of it is technically amazing, and absolutely fantastic for technical users, but not really suited for the general consumer market. (With some notable exceptions, of course - see Firefox.)

Not sure this also counts but almost 100% (leave a side asm.js/webasm for now) of the code run by browsers (JavaScript) also comes eith access to source.

Open source is a bit like that. Much like a book has to be read rather than merely used/worn, Open Source Software has to be cloned/forked/apt-get-ed/'make'd and so forth.

Now if you were to buy a pair of leather shoes then the particulars of what chemicals and processes were required to tan the leather may well be learned from the 'Principles of Leather Tanning' but tweaked a bit to a proprietary recipe that could be kept 'under wraps'.

Regarding the Open Source desktop applications, Libre Office is not a clone of Word/Excel/Access/Powerpoint. Same with Gimp, it is not a feeble clone of Photoshop. These tools may be able to use the same file formats but there is a different ethos to them. For some people the UX of Libre Office is far superior to MS Office - no ribbon and therefore no need to Google search the simplest of tasks. If you are dealing with data - as in CSV files - then OpenOffice is your friend, MS Office just ruins it. This does not affect people doing glorified to-do lists and glorified receipts in Excel but if you are reading in data from some code you have written then OpenOffice is the more productive tool.

Never mind that MS have a long long history of playing dirty.

I distinctly recall that back when the netbook first appeared, MS did a 180 on their efforts to kill Windows XP because Vista could not run on such low spec hardware.

Never mind that later on you could find Dell selling Windows equipped netbooks with a rebate campaign that made the higher spec Windows variant actually cheaper than the lower spec Linux (Ubuntu) variant (what is the chance that MS was funding that campaign?).

Damn it, these days Microsoft waves the OEM license fee for tablets with a screen below 9 inches.

For mobiles it is a little different, because iOS locks people to their browser, but at least on Android users would be using Chrome.

Heck I am typing this on a chromebook, simply because I realized 80% of what I do is webbrowsing anyway.

I think one key is that Shenzhen's manufacturing culture was not too centralised or formalised. This let a culture to emerge. I think your emphasis on is right. Culture, not ruleset or ideology. Emergent, not designed by some philosopher.

Most people want an absolute answer, an absolute truth about intellectual property. A clear right and wrong that tells us what IP laws should be. The answer needs be true for chemistry in the 18th century, aeronautical engineering in the 19th, medicines in the 20th and software in the 21st. I don't think this truth exists.

Ideology is not the way out of this. Ideological thinking (eg Stallman, Rand, Marx, Plato) is important as an exercise, but when people actually buy into ideology we're doomed to fail. The way an ideological thought process goes is usually:

(1) Start from fundamental truths, usually moral truths. Property is exploitation. Unfree software is immoral. Selfishness is the only true love. Platonic forms are the truest truths. etc. Prove your truths metaphysically. Hold them self evident. Make them immutable.

(2) Find some complicated but (seemingly) airtight way that everything good about life, the universe and everything will inevitably follow when people accept the Fundamental Truth. Software will be better. The economy will be better. We will achieve a classless harmonious society. Technology will advance. etc.

To do this properly, you'll probably need to produce a very long, very boring book that works out all the details. This is how roads and police will work without government. This is how the economy will work without money. This is how software will be an industry when everything is strictly GNU. This is how hover boards will be invented.

This step is inside baseball. Anyone who can slog through "Objectivist Epistemology" or "Das Capital" is... you need to be a hardcore believer.

(3) Keep adding to no. 2. The more pages, the better. No. 1 can never change. No. 2 now needs to explain the entire world. Don't give up. Keep going. There is no such thing as a corner you can't argue your way out of with enough new terms. Degenerate Socialist State. Core-periphery modes of production.

Keep going. Stay motivated. There is no such thing as a corner you can't argue out of with enough focus on a relevant totality, the transitory nature of social forms and a dialectical sense of motion through conflict and contradiction.

...This road goes nowhere. There is no absolute truth of life the universe and everything. You asked the wrong question.

I totally agree that the IP/copyright systems that exist today and are being promoted as the no. 1 priority in international law... they are not good systems. At least, it would be very helpful to have other systems as well. The best systems will probably emerge, not be designed by lawyers.

But there are of course two sides to this story. Pirated editions back then as today increase the popularity of the artists, often more than their agency could do.

Unsurprisingly, even in the 19th century they came to a similar solution like our current music industry (minus the unsuccessful DRM part). You can't pirate live performances: "When he returned in 1867, he had mastered a way to generate alternative income streams based on his celebrity status. He performed readings of his work to packed houses and collected the receipts from the door."

The assumption here seems to be that their riches come from IP protections. It could be argued that the IP protections are a result of lobbying from rich companies.

I am not arguing that the causation is wrong, but the implied claim does not follow from the observation.

you have something in the line that correlation is not causation?

I strongly disagree with that. Just like with patents, the regulative protection must end at some point so the cultural and technological heritage is shared among all descendants, and not just a few lucky. The protection duration is already too long, not too short.